a cathedral courtship(教堂求婚记)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 4 0 91.86KB 25 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

A CATHEDRAL COURTSHIP

A CATHEDRAL

COURTSHIP

A CATHEDRAL COURTSHIP

SHE

WINCHESTER, May 28, 1891 The Royal Garden Inn.

We are doing the English cathedral towns, aunt Celia and I. Aunt

Celia has an intense desire to improve my mind. Papa told her, when we

were leaving Cedarhurst, that he wouldn't for the world have it too much

improved, and aunt Celia remarked that, so far as she could judge, there

was no immediate danger; with which exchange of hostilities they parted.

We are traveling under the yoke of an iron itinerary, warranted neither

to bend nor break. It was made out by a young High Church curate in

New York, and if it had been blessed by all the bishops and popes it could

not be more sacred to aunt Celia. She is awfully High Church, and I

believe she thinks this tour of the cathedrals will give me a taste for ritual

and bring me into the true fold. I have been hearing dear old Dr. Kyle a

great deal lately, and aunt Celia says that he is the most dangerous

Unitarian she knows, because he has leanings towards Christianity.

Long ago, in her youth, she was engaged to a young architect. He,

with his triangles and T-squares and things, succeeded in making an

imaginary scale-drawing of her heart (up to that time a virgin forest, an

unmapped territory), which enabled him to enter in and set up a pedestal

there, on which he has remained ever since. He has been only a memory

for many years, to be sure, for he died at the age of twenty-six, before he

had had time to build anything but a livery stable and a country hotel.

This is fortunate, on the whole, because aunt Celia thinks he was destined

to establish American architecture on a higher plane,--rid it of its base,

time- serving, imitative instincts, and waft it to a height where, in the

course of centuries, we should have been revered and followed by all the

nations of the earth. I went to see the livery stable, after one of these

Miriam-like flights of prophecy on the might-have-been. It isn't fair to

judge a man's promise by one performance, and that one a livery stable, so

I shall say nothing.

This sentiment about architecture and this fondness for the very

A CATHEDRAL COURTSHIP

toppingest High Church ritual cause aunt Celia to look on the English

cathedrals with solemnity and reverential awe. She has given me a fat

notebook, with "Katharine Schuyler" stamped in gold letters on the Russia

leather cover, and a lock and key to protect its feminine confidences. I

am not at all the sort of girl who makes notes, and I have told her so; but

she says that I must at least record my passing impressions, if they are

ever so trivial and commonplace.

I wanted to go directly from Southampton to London with the Abbotts,

our ship friends, who left us yesterday. Roderick Abbott and I had had a

charming time on board ship (more charming than aunt Celia knows,

because she was very ill, and her natural powers of chaperoning were

severely impaired), and the prospect of seeing London sights together was

not unpleasing; but Roderick Abbott is not in aunt Celia's itinerary, which

reads: "Winchester, Salisbury, Wells, Bath, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford,

London, Ely, Lincoln, York, Durham."

Aunt Celia is one of those persons who are born to command, and

when they are thrown in contact with those who are born to be

commanded all goes as merry as a marriage bell; otherwise not.

So here we are at Winchester; and I don't mind all the Roderick

Abbotts in the universe, now that I have seen the Royal Garden Inn, its

pretty coffee-room opening into the old-fashioned garden, with its borders

of clove pinks, its aviaries, and its blossoming horse- chestnuts, great

towering masses of pink bloom!

Aunt Celia has driven to St. Cross Hospital with Mrs. Benedict, an

estimable lady tourist whom she "picked up" en route from Southampton.

I am tired, and stayed at home. I cannot write letters, because aunt Celia

has the guide-books, so I sit by the window in indolent content, watching

the dear little school laddies, with their short jackets and wide white

collars; they all look so jolly, and rosy, and clean, and kissable! I should

like to kiss the chambermaid, too! She has a pink print dress; no bangs,

thank goodness (it's curious our servants can't leave that deformity to the

upper classes), but shining brown hair, plump figure, soft voice, and a

most engaging way of saying, "Yes, miss? Anythink more, miss?" I

long to ask her to sit down comfortably and be English, while I study her

A CATHEDRAL COURTSHIP

as a type, but of course I mustn't. Sometimes I wish I could retire from the

world for a season and do what I like, "surrounded by the general comfort

of being thought mad."

An elegant, irreproachable, high-minded model of dignity and reserve

has just knocked and inquired what we will have for dinner. It is very

embarrassing to give orders to a person who looks like a judge of the

Supreme Court, but I said languidly, "What would you suggest?"

"How would you like a clear soup, a good spring soup, to begin with,

miss?"

"Very much."

"And a bit of turbot next, miss?"

"Yes, turbot, by all means," I said, my mouth watering at the word.

"And what for a roast, miss? Would you enjoy a young duckling,

miss?"

"Just the thing; and for dessert"--I couldn't think what we ought to

have for dessert in England, but the high-minded model coughed

apologetically and said, "I was thinking you might like gooseberry tart and

cream for a sweet, miss."

Oh that I could have vented my New World enthusiasm in a shriek of

delight as I heard those intoxicating words, heretofore met only in English

novels!

"Ye-es," I said hesitatingly, though I was palpitating with joy, "I fancy

we should like gooseberry tart (here a bright idea entered my mind) and

perhaps in case my aunt doesn't care for the gooseberry tart, you might

bring a lemon squash, please."

Now I had never met a lemon squash personally, but I had often heard

of it, and wished to show my familiarity with British culinary art.

"One lemon squash, miss?"

"Oh, as to that, it doesn't matter," I said haughtily; "bring a sufficient

number for two persons."

* * *

Aunt Celia came home in the highest feather. She had twice been

taken for an Englishwoman. She said she thought that lemon squash was

a drink; I thought it was a pie; but we shall find out at dinner, for, as I said,

A CATHEDRAL COURTSHIP

I ordered a sufficient number for two persons.

At four o'clock we attended even-song at the cathedral. I shall not

say what I felt when the white-surpliced boy choir entered, winding down

those vaulted aisles, or when I heard for the first time that intoned service,

with all its "witchcraft of harmonic sound." I sat quite by myself in a

high carved-oak seat, and the hour was passed in a trance of serene delight.

I do not have many opinions, it is true, but papa says I am always strong

on sentiments; nevertheless, I shall not attempt to tell even what I feel in

these new and beautiful experiences, for it has been better told a thousand

times.

There were a great many people at service, and a large number of

Americans among them, I should think, though we saw no familiar faces.

There was one particularly nice young man, who looked like a Bostonian.

He sat opposite me. He didn't stare,--he was too well bred; but when I

looked the other way, he looked at me. Of course I could feel his eyes,--

anybody can, at least any girl can; but I attended to every word of the

service, and was as good as an angel. When the procession had filed out

and the last strain of the great organ had rumbled into silence, we went on

a tour through the cathedral, a heterogeneous band, headed by a

conscientious old verger who did his best to enlighten us, and succeeded

in virtually spoiling my pleasure.

After we had finished (think of "finishing" a cathedral in an hour or

two!), aunt Celia and I, with one or two others, wandered through the

beautiful close, looking at the exterior from every possible point, and

coming at last to a certain ruined arch which is very famous. It did not

strike me as being remarkable. I could make any number of them with a

pattern, without the least effort. But at any rate, when told by the verger

to gaze upon the beauties of this wonderful relic and tremble, we were

obliged to gaze also upon the beauties of the aforesaid nice young man,

who was sketching it. As we turned to go away, aunt Celia dropped her

bag. It is one of those detestable, all-absorbing, all-devouring,

thoroughly respectable, but never proud Boston bags, made of black cloth

with leather trimmings, "C. Van T." embroidered on the side, and the top

drawn up with stout cords which pass over the Boston wrist or arm. As for

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ACATHEDRALCOURTSHIP1ACATHEDRALCOURTSHIPACATHEDRALCOURTSHIP2SHEWINCHESTER,May28,1891TheRoyalGardenInn.WearedoingtheEnglishcathedraltowns,auntCeliaandI.AuntCeliahasanintensedesiretoimprovemymind.Papatoldher,whenwewereleavingCedarhurst,thathewouldn'tfortheworldhaveittoomuchimproved,andauntCeliaremarked...

展开>> 收起<<

a cathedral courtship(教堂求婚记).pdf

共25页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

a cathedral courtship(教堂求婚记)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: