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A Very Ill-Tempered Family
by
At this moment–having fully realized the downfall of the theatricals–Bobby burst into a howl of weeping. Alice scolded him for crying, and Charles reproached her for scolding him, on the score that her antipathy to Mr. Clinton had driven Philip to this extreme point of insult and ill-temper.
Charles’s own conduct had been so far from soothing, that Alice had abundant material for retorts, and she was not likely to be a loser in the war of words. What she did say I did not hear, for by that time I had locked myself up in my own room.
CHAPTER IX.
SELF-REPROACH–FAMILY DISCOMFORT–OUT ON THE MARSH–VICTORY.
If I could have locked myself up anywhere else I should have preferred it. I would have justified my own part in the present family quarrel to Aunt Isobel herself, and yet I would rather not have been alone just now with the text I had made and pinned up, and with my new picture. However, there was nowhere else to go to.
A restless way I have of pacing up and down when I am in a rage, has often reminded me of the habits of the more ferocious of the wild beasts in the Zoological Gardens, and has not lessened my convictions on the subject of the family temper. For a few prowls up and down my den I managed to occupy my thoughts with fuming against Philip’s behaviour, but as the first flush of anger began to cool, there was no keeping out of my head the painful reflections which the sight of my text, my picture, and my books suggested–the miserable contrast between my good resolves and the result.
“It only shows,” I muttered to myself, in a voice about as amiable as the growlings of a panther, “it only shows that it is quite hopeless. We’re an ill-tempered family–a hopelessly ill-tempered family; and to try to cure us is like patching the lungs of a consumptive family, I don’t even wish that I could forgive Philip. He doesn’t deserve it.”
And then as I nursed the cut on my elbow, and recalled the long hours of work at the properties, the damaged scene, the rifling of the green-room, and Philip’s desertion with the Dragon, his probable industry for Mr. Clinton’s theatricals, and the way he had left us to face our own disappointed audience, fierce indignation got the upper hand once more.
“I don’t care,” I growled afresh; “if I have lost my temper, I believe I was right to lose it–at least, that no one could have been expected not to lose it, I will never beg his pardon for it, let Aunt Isobel say what she will. I should hate him ever after if I did, for the injustice of the thing. Pardon, indeed!”
I turned at the top of the room and paced back towards the window, towards the long illuminated text, and that
“—- Noble face,
So sweet and full of grace,”
which bent unchangeable from the emblem of suffering and self-sacrifice.
I have a trick of talking to myself and to inanimate objects. I addressed myself now to the text and the picture.
“But if I don’t,” I continued, “if after being confirmed with Philip in the autumn, we come to just one of our old catastrophes in the very next holidays, as bad as ever, and spiting each other to the last–I shall take you all down to-morrow! I don’t pretend to be able to persuade myself that black is white–like Mrs. Rampant; but I am not a hypocrite, I won’t ornament my room with texts, and crosses, and pictures, and symbols of Eternal Patience, when I do not even mean to try to sacrifice myself, or to be patient.”
It is curious how one’s faith and practice hang together. I felt very doubtful whether it was even desirable that I should. Whether we did not misunderstand GOD’S will, in thinking that it is well that people in the right should ever sacrifice themselves for those who are in the wrong. I did not however hide from myself, that to say this was to unsay all my resolves about my besetting sin. I decided to take down my texts, pictures, and books, and grimly thought that I would frame a fine photograph Charles had given me of a lioness, and would make a new inscription, the motto of the old Highland Clan Chattan–with which our family is remotely connected–“Touch not the cat but a glove.”[1]