قراءة كتاب Rich Relatives
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an English princess, prefers to make her younger son as English as possible, and will not allow any German doctors to interfere with the treatment prescribed by your Uncle Hector. Of course the poor boy will never be well enough to take an active part in the affairs of his country, and as he is not the heir, there is not much opposition in Pomerania to his being educated abroad. Indeed Baron Miltzen said to me only the last time he ran over that he thought an English education was probably the best in the world for anyone as simple as the dear Prince. If we cannot get away to the Riviera this winter you will have to pay us a visit and help to keep the Prince amused. We have dispensed with ceremony almost entirely, because we found that it excited the Prince too much. In fact it was finally decided to entrust him to us, because after the first levee he attended the poor fellow always wanted to walk backwards, and it took us quite a little time to cure him of this habit.
Love from us both,
Your affectionate
Aunt Mildred.
Indeed Jasmine had heard about the Prince, because her father always told everybody he met that one of his brothers had been fool enough to take charge of a royal lunatic. She remembered thinking that he seemed proud of the fact, and she could never understand why, particularly as he spoke so contemptuously of his brother's part in the association. "Here's pleasant news," her father used to say, "my brother the Colonel has turned himself into a court flunkey. That's a pretty position for a Grant! Yes, yes.... He's taken charge of Prince Adalbert of Pomerania, the second son of the Grand Duke of Pomerania. You remember, who married Princess Caroline, the Duke of Gloucester's third daughter? I'm ashamed of my brother. I suppose he had to accept, though; I know it's hard to get out of these things when you mix yourself up with royalty. I really believe that I'm the only independent member of the family—the only one who can call his life his own."
Jasmine quickly took out Aunt Ellen's letter, lest she should seem to be criticizing her dead father by thinking any more about Prince Adalbert.
The Deanery,
Silchester,
July 21st.
My dear Jasmine,
When your Uncle Arnold, wrote to you about your father's sad death, he forgot to add an invitation to come and stay with us later on. Now your Aunt May writes to me that it is definitely decided that you should come to England, and your six boy cousins are most eager to make your acquaintance. I say "boy" cousins, but alas! some of them are very much young men these days. I fear we are all growing old, though your poor father might have expected to live many more years if he had not been so imprudent. But even as a boy he was always catching cold through standing about sailing boats in the Round Pond when your grandfather was Vicar of St. Mary's, Kensington. However, we must not repine. God's wisdom is often hidden from us, and we must trust in His fatherly love. I wonder if you have learnt any typewriting? Uncle Arnold so dislikes continuous changes in his secretaries, and his work seems to increase every year. He only intended to do a short history of England before the Norman Conquest, but the more he goes on, the further he goes back, and if you were at all interested in Saxon life I do think it would be worth your while to see if you liked typewriting. Ethelred has been learning it in the morning instead of practising the piano, but he does not seem to want to make a great deal of progress. It's so difficult to understand what children want sometimes. I suppose our Heavenly Father feels the same about all of us. When I am tempted to blame Ethelred I remember this. Of course as a Roman Catholic you have not been taught a very great deal about God, but we are all His children, and you must not grieve too much over your loss. "Not lost but gone before," you must say to yourself. I remember you every night in my prayers.
Your loving
Aunt Ellen.
Jasmine was asking herself how to set about learning to typewrite, and making resolutions to check a faint inclination to regret that she had so many rich relatives anxious to help her, when the languid puffs of air from the South swelled suddenly into a real wind and blew all the paper on the bench up into the air and down again into one of the little back gardens below the parapet—all the paper, that is, except Lady Grant's blue envelope, which even a gale could scarcely have disturbed.
Jasmine, brought up in Sirene, was not accustomed to conceal her feelings in the way that a well-educated English girl would have known how to conceal them. The loss of the letters dismayed her, and she showed as much by climbing on the parapet of the wall and gazing down into the garden below.
At that moment a much freckled young man with what is called sandy hair came along, and without looking to see if he was observed immediately scrambled up beside her. Even a Sunday school teacher on his way to class might have been forgiven for doing as much; but this young man was evidently nothing of the kind. Indeed, with his grey flannel trousers and Norfolk jacket, he imparted to the atmosphere of Sunday a distinct whiff of the previous afternoon; standing up there beside Jasmine, he looked like a golfer who had lost his ball.
"What have you dropped? A hairpin?" he asked.
Jasmine could not help laughing at the notion of bothering about a hairpin, and she pointed to Mrs. Eneas Grant's letter nestling among the branches of a sunflower; to where Mrs. Alexander Grant's invitation to amuse Prince Adalbert of Pomerania twitched nervously on the neat gravel path; and to where Mrs. Lightbody's suggestions, ghostly and practical, clung for a moment to a drain-pipe, before they collapsed into what was left on a broken plate of the cat's dinner.
The twelve-foot drop into the garden below was nothing: the young man accomplished it with an enthusiastic absence of hesitation. To gather up the letters was the labour of a minute. But to get back again was impossible, because the owner of the house, disgusted by the untidiness of Roman and mediæval masonry, had repaired and pointed that portion of the wall which bounded his garden.
"There isn't one niche for your foot," murmured Jasmine, almost tenderly solicitous.
"I must ring the bell and borrow a ladder," said the stranger. After a moment's search he announced in an indignant voice that the house apparently did not possess a bell.
A man in shirt sleeves, interrupted at the second or third of his forty Sabbath winks, leaned out of an upper window and asked Jasmine what she thought she was doing jibbering and jabbering on his garden wall; before she had time to explain, he perceived the young man in the garden, and asked him what he thought he was doing havering and hovering about among his flowers.
"I was looking for the bell."
"Bell! You long-legged fool! What d'you think I should keep a bell in my back garden for, when the children won't let the bells in front have a moment's peace?" Then he made a noise like a dog shut in a door. "Ough! Take your great feet out of my petunias, can't you! If I want my flowers trampled on, I can get a steam-roller to do it. I don't want your help."
"This lady dropped something in your garden," the young man explained, and the owner smiled bitterly.
"Aye," he went on, "that's what they all say. Please, mister, our Amy's dropped her damned doll in your garden, can she come round and fetch it back? It's like living in a dustbin. A scandal, that's what I say it is. A public scandal."
Then began one of those long arguments in which people roused from sleep seem to delight, provided always that they have been sufficiently roused to feel that it is not worth