C1-4 女主在阿姨家的童年记忆（英语小说南方与北方）

睹物思人，回忆涌现

Margaret went up into the old nursery at the very top of the house, where

Newton was busy getting up some laces which were required for the

wedding. While Newton went (not without a muttered grumbling) to

undo the shawls, which had already been exhibited four or five times that

day, Margaret looked round upon the nursery; the first room in that

house with which she had become familiar nine years ago, when she was

brought, all untamed from the forest, to share the home, the play, and

the lessons of her cousin Edith. She remembered the dark, dim look of

the London nursery, presided over by an austere and ceremonious nurse,

who was terribly particular about clean hands and torn frocks. She

recollected the first tea up there—separate from her father and aunt, who

were dining somewhere down below an infinite depth of stairs; for unless

she were up in the sky (the child thought), they must be deep down in

the bowels of the earth. At home—before she came to live in Harley

Street—her mother's dressing-room had been her nursery; and, as they

kept early hours in the country parsonage, Margaret had always had her

meals with her father and mother. Oh! well did the tall stately girl of

eighteen remember the tears shed with such wild passion of grief by the

little girl of nine, as she hid her face under the bed-clothes, in that first

night; and how she was bidden not to cry by the nurse, because it would

disturb Miss Edith; and how she had cried as bitterly, but more quietly,

till her newly-seen, grand, pretty aunt had come softly upstairs with Mr.

Hale to show him his little sleeping daughter. Then the little Margaret

had hushed her sobs, and tried to lie quiet as if asleep, for fear of making

her father unhappy by her grief, which she dared not express before her

aunt, and which she rather thought it was wrong to feel at all after the

long hoping, and planning, and contriving they had gone through at

home, before her wardrobe could be arranged so as to suit her grander 5

circumstances, and before papa could leave his parish to come up to

London, even for a few days.

Now she had got to love the old nursery, though it was but a dismantled

place; and she looked all round, with a kind of cat-like regret, at the idea

of leaving it for ever in three days.