• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1077 0

of St Elizabeth of Hungary.58 It has the disadvantage of being in Prussia; and it is always disagreeable to go into that country,59 but it is very old and there are many double-spired churches and it stands up like a pyramid out of the green valley of the Lahn.60 I don’t suppose the Ashburnhams wanted especially to go there and I didn’t especially want to go there myself. But, you understand, there was no objection. It was part of the cure to make an excursion three or four times a week. So that we were all quite unanimous in being grateful to Florence for providing the motive power. Florence, of course, had a motive of her own. She was at that time engaged in educating Captain Ashburnham – oh, of course, quite pour le bon motif!61 She used to say to Leonora: ‘I simply can’t understand how you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant!’ Leonora herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated. At any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell her. Perhaps she got it up out of Baedeker before Florence was up in the morning. I don’t mean to say that you would ever have known that Leonora knew anything, but if Florence started to tell us how Ludwig the Courageous wanted to have three wives at once – in which he differed from Henry VIII, who wanted them one after the other62 and this caused a good deal of trouble – if Florence started to tell us this, Leonora would just nod her head in a way that quite pleasantly rattled my poor wife.

She used to exclaim: ‘Well, if you knew it, why haven’t you told it all already to Captain Ashburnham? I’m sure he finds it interesting!’ And Leonora would look reflectively at her husband and say: ‘I have an idea that it might injure his hand – the hand, you know, used in connection with horses’ mouths…’ And poor Ashburnham would blush and mutter and would say: ‘That’s all right. Don’t you bother about me.’

I fancy his wife’s irony did quite alarm poor Teddy; because one evening he asked me seriously in the smoking-room if I thought that having too much in one’s head would really interfere with one’s quickness in polo. It struck him, he said, that brainy Johnnies generally were rather muffs when they got on to four legs. I reassured him as best I could. I told him that he wasn’t likely to take in enough to upset his balance. At that time the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence. She used to do it about three or four times a week under the approving eyes of Leonora and myself. It wasn’t, you understand, systematic. It came in bursts. It was Florence clearing up one of the dark places of the earth,63 leaving the world a little lighter than she had found it. She would tell him the story of Hamlet; explain the form of a symphony, humming the first and second subjects to him, and so on; she would explain to him the difference between Arminians and Erastians,64 or she would give him a short lecture on the early history of the United States. And it was done in a way well calculated to arrest a young attention. Did you ever read Mrs Markham?65 Well, it was like that…

But our excursion to M – was a much larger, a much more full dress affair. You see, in the archives of the Schloss66 in that city there was a document which Florence thought would finally give her the chance to educate the whole lot of us together. It really worried poor Florence that she couldn’t, in matters of culture, ever get the better of Leonora. I don’t know what Leonora knew or what she didn’t know, but certainly she was always there whenever Florence brought out any information. And she gave, somehow, the impression of really knowing what poor Florence gave the impression of having only picked up. I can’t exactly define it. It was almost something physical. Have you ever seen a retriever dashing in play after a greyhound? You see the two running over a green field, almost side by side, and suddenly the retriever makes a friendly snap at the other. And the greyhound simply isn’t there. You haven’t observed it quicken its speed or strain a limb; but there it is, just two yards