Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
They talked, and then Tilly brought the tea-tray, set for two. Ursula
had a special green and gold cup kept for herself at the Marsh. There
was thin bread and butter, and cress for tea. It was all special and
wonderful. She ate very daintily, with little fastidious bites.
“Why do you have two wedding-rings, grandmother?—Must you?” asked the
child, noticing her grandmother’s ivory coloured hand with blue veins,
above the tray.
“If I had two husbands, child.”
Ursula pondered a moment.
“Then you must wear both rings together?”
“Yes.”
“Which was my grandfather’s ring?”
The woman hesitated.
“This grandfather whom you knew? This was his ring, the red one. The
yellow one was your other grandfather’s whom you never knew.”
Ursula looked interestedly at the two rings on the proffered finger.
“Where did he buy it you?” she asked.
“This one? In Warsaw, I think.”
“You didn’t know my own grandfather then?”
“Not this grandfather.”
Ursula pondered this fascinating intelligence.
“Did he have white whiskers as well?”
“No, his beard was dark. You have his brows, I think.”
Ursula ceased and became self-conscious. She at once identified herself
with her Polish grandfather.
“And did he have brown eyes?”
“Yes, dark eyes. He was a clever man, as quick as a lion. He was never
still.”
Lydia still resented Lensky. When she thought of him, she was always
younger than he, she was always twenty, or twenty-five, and under his
domination. He incorporated her in his ideas as if she were not a
person herself, as if she were just his aide-de-camp, or part of his
baggage, or one among his surgical appliances. She still resented it.
And he was always only thirty: he had died when he was thirty-four. She
did not feel sorry for him. He was older than she. Yet she still ached
in the thought of those days.
“Did you like my first grandfather best?” asked Ursula.
“I liked them both,” said the grandmother.
And, thinking, she became again Lensky’s girl-bride. He was of good
family, of better family even than her own, for she was half German.
She was a young girl in a house of insecure fortune. And he, an
intellectual, a clever surgeon and physician, had loved her. How she
had looked up to him! She remembered her first transports when he
talked to her, the important young man with the severe black beard. He
had seemed so wonderful, such an authority. After her own lax
household, his gravity and confident, hard authority seemed almost
God-like to her. For she had never known it in her life, all her
surroundings had been loose, lax, disordered, a welter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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