: The Caxtons: A Family Picture — Volume 08 by Lytton Edward Bulwer Lytton Baron - English fiction 19th century; Families Fiction

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Edition: 10

There entered, in the front drawing-room of my father's house in Russell Street, an Elf! clad in white,--small, delicate, with curls of jet over her shoulders; with eyes so large and so lustrous that they shone through the room as no eyes merely human could possibly shine. The Elf approached, and stood facing us. The sight was so unexpected and the apparition so strange that we remained for some moments in startled silence. At length my father, as the bolder and wiser man of the two, and the more fitted to deal with the eerie things of another world, had the audacity to step close up to the little creature, and, bending down to examine its face, said, "What do you want, my pretty child?"

Pretty child! Was it only a pretty child after all? Alas! it would be well if all we mistake for fairies at the first glance could resolve themselves only into pretty children.

"Come," answered the child, with a foreign accent, and taking my father by the lappet of his coat, "come, poor papa is so ill! I am frightened! come, and save him."

"Certainly," exclaimed my father, quickly. "Where's my hat, Sisty? Certainly, my child; we will go and save papa."

"But who is papa?" asked Pisistratus,--a question that would never have occurred to my father. He never asked who or what the sick papas of poor children were when the children pulled him by the lappet of his coat. "Who is papa?"

The child looked hard at me, and the big tears rolled from those large, luminous eyes, but quite silently. At this moment a full-grown figure filled up the threshold, and emerging from the shadow, presented to us the aspect of a stout, well-favored young woman. She dropped a courtesy, and then said, mincingly,--

"Oh, miss, you ought to have waited for me, and not alarmed the gentlefolks by running upstairs in that way! If you please, sir, I was settling with the cabman, and he was so imperent,--them low fellows always are, when they have only us poor women to deal with, sir, and--"

"But what is the matter?" cried I, for my father had taken the child in his arms soothingly, and she was now weeping on his breast.

"Why, you see, sir , the gent only arrived last night at our hotel, sir,--the Lamb, close by Lunnun Bridge,--and he was taken ill, and he's not quite in his right mind like; so we sent for the doctor, and the doctor looked at the brass plate on the gent's carpet- bag, sir, and then he looked into the 'Court Guide,' and he said, 'There is a Mr. Caxton in Great Russell Street,--is he any relation?' and this young lady said, 'That's my papa's brother, and we were going there.' And so, sir, as the Boots was out, I got into a cab, and miss would come with me, and--"

"Roland--Roland ill! Quick, quick, quick!" cried my father, and with the child still in his arms he ran down the stairs. I followed with his hat, which of course he had forgotten. A cab, by good luck, was passing our very door; but the chambermaid would not let us enter it till she had satisfied herself that it was not the same she had dismissed. This preliminary investigation completed, we entered and drove to the Lamb.

The chambermaid, who sat opposite, passed the time in ineffectual overtures to relieve my father of the little girl,--who still clung nestling to his breast,--in a long epic, much broken into episodes, of the causes which had led to her dismissal of the late cabman, who, to swell his fare, had thought proper to take a "circumbendibus!"--and with occasional tugs at her cap, and smoothings down of her gown, and apologies for being such a figure, especially when her eyes rested on my satin cravat, or drooped on my shining boots.

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