Well, there they were! Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan--quite a small
child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls, white
waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an eye on heaven.
Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always been rather like
that--a wonderful man to the last. Yes, she must have had talent, and
miniatures always had a certain back-watered cachet of their own, little
subject to the currents of competition on aesthetic Change. Soames
opened the drawing-room door. The room was dusted, the furniture
uncovered, the curtains drawn back, precisely as if his aunts still
dwelt there patiently waiting. And a thought came to him: When
Timothy died--why not? Would it not be almost a duty to preserve this
house--like Carlyle's--and put up a tablet, and show it? "Specimen of
mid-Victorian abode--entrance, one shilling, with catalogue." After all,
it was the completest thing, and perhaps the deadest in the London of
to-day. Perfect in its special taste and culture, if, that is, he took
down and carried over to his own collection the four Barbizon pictures
he had given them. The still sky-blue walls, tile green curtains
patterned with red flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen
before the cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows,
full of little knickknacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley,
Southey, Cowper, Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the
Victorian poets in a bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with
dim red plush, full of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles
of their mother's father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one
very yellow elephant's tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar
Forsyte, who had been in jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up,
with spidery writing on it, recording God knew what! And the pictures
crowding on the walls--all water-colours save those four Barbizons
looking like the foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at
that--pictures bright and illustrative, "Telling the Bees," "Hey for the
Ferry!" and two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines,
given them by Swithin. Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames had gazed
a thousand times in supercilious fascination; a marvellous collection of
bright, smooth gilt frames.
And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed
as ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it. And the
gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked. And on one side of the
fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her Aunt
Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright. And on
the other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to the light,
for Aunt Hester. Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them
sitting there. Ah! and the atmosphere--even now, of too many stuffs and
washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings. 'No,' he
thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it ought to be preserved.' And,
by George, they might laugh at it, but for a standard of gentle life
never departed from, for fastidiousness of skin and eye and nose and
feeling, it beat to-day hollow--to-day with its Tubes and cars, its
perpetual smoking, its cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the
knees and down to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the
satyr within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their
feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate, and
their "So longs," and their "Old Beans," and their laughter--girls who
gave him the shudders whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them;
and the hard-eyed, capable, older women who managed life and gave him
the shudders too. No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds,
their eyes, or very much their windows, at least had manners, and a
standard, and reverence for past and future.