Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/66

of snubbing, would have quelled his ghostly essence, would have taught his undying part that at any rate it was not wanted among the posterity of his race. But (and the situation really had its pathetic side) here it was, with the flair of these uncanny insubstantialities, finding a welcome at last (though not perhaps of the most rapturous) in the great—great—oh, je vous le donne en mille!—in the thousandth great-niece, Lucille Silverdale, daughter and sister of, in abstract phrase, the Healthy Commonplace of the British Nation. It was rare enough, as I said—that shrinking from, that deprecation of, their sole title to distinction; one longed to trace it back to its source, to discover from what veil that impish finger had darted, whether, to add a quaintness the more, he, the wit, the sweet singer of that honeyed age, had been as unwelcome to his family circle as she, the somewhat unwilling inheritress of his genius, was to hers. But of that bygone blazon upon the Silverdale 'scutcheon, it would have been ill-advised, perilous to speak; to Lucille even the subject was painful, and in the most impracticable sort of way.

She did say to me once, in a moment of acute dejection, that in any other family she would probably have been the idol, insufferably thrust for worship upon every new-comer. "But as it is," she finished sadly, though with her unquenchable twinkle, "I am a skeleton, rattling my impossible bones, not in a nice musty hiding-place of my own, but in the comfortable, general family-cupboard, which they can't open without seeing me. And they have to open it every day—before visitors, too!"

If I laughed somewhat oppressively at her analogy, I daresay she divined part of the reason, and didn't wonder that her amazing comicality should have filled my eyes with tears. . . .

Well, skeleton or idol, she was sufficiently lonely. They were all so rudely healthy-minded, so full of the working-out of theirrosy-