Volume Two—Chapter Eleven.Lady Littletown’s Diplomacy.Mr Elbraham had not been long making up his mind to eschew shilly-shallying, and to propose at once. He was a clever man of business, and no one knew better than he how to work a few shares upon the Stock Exchange, and float a company so as to pour thousands into the laps of its promoters; but he had a weak side, and his late action was taken a good deal on account of the opposition he met with from his private secretary.“Going to dine with ‘the maids of honour’ at Hampton Court!” said this latter gentleman, looking up in astonishment as his principal announced his intention; “why, you grumbled at having to go to Lady Littletown’s the other day, and she does give good dinners.”“Capital,” said the financier, smacking his lips.“But you won’t get anything fit to eat at the Palace.”“My object is to get into better society,” said the financier promptly; “and the Dymcoxes are people of position. Of course, you know I met them there.”“Ah, to be sure; so you did. Well, they certainly belong to a good family.”“Yes,” said Mr Elbraham, strutting pompously up and down the room. “Lovely girl that Miss Clotilde!”“Well, I don’t know,” said Arthur Litton; “she is handsome, certainly.”“Humph! I should think she is, sir.”“But I’ve seen many finer women,” continued Litton. “Not my style of girl at all.”“Should think not, indeed,” said Elbraham hotly. “Bah, sir! stuff, sir! rubbish, sir! What do you know about handsome women?”“Well, certainly,” said Litton humbly, and with a smile, as the financier walked away from him down the room—a smile which was replaced by a look as serious as that of the proverbial judge, when the great man turned; “I suppose my opinion is not worth much.”“I should think not, indeed. I tell you she is magnificent.”“Oh, nonsense, my dear sir,” said Litton warmly; “handsome if you like, but magnificent—no! You know dozens of finer women.”“Maybe, maybe,” said the financier.Litton paused for a few moments, tapping his teeth as if undecided, till his chief paused and looked at him curiously.“Well, what is it?” he said.“Look here, Mr Elbraham,” said Litton, “I suppose we are not very good friends?”“H’m, I don’t know. You are in my pay,” said the financier coarsely, “so you ought to be one of my best friends.”“You’ve said too many sharp things to me, Mr Elbraham, to make me feel warmly towards you; but, all the same, I confess that you have done me some very good turns in money matters; and I hope, though I take your pay, that I am too much of a gentleman to stand by and see anyone take a mean advantage of a weakness on your part.”“Weakness? My part!” said the financier fiercely, as if the very idea of his being weak was absurd.“Yes, sir, weakness. Look here, Mr Elbraham, I should not like to see you taken in.”“What do you mean, sir?”“Mean?” said Litton. “Well, Mr Elbraham, I’m not afraid of you; so whether you are offended or not, I shall speak out.”“Then speak out, sir, and don’t shilly-shally.”“Well, sir, it seems to me that there’s a good deal of fortune-hunting about. Those Dymcox people have good blood, certainly; but they’re as poor as rats, and I’ll be bound to say nothing would please the old aunts better than hooking you, with one of those girls for a bait.”“Will you have the goodness to reply to that batch of letters, Mr Litton?” said Elbraham haughtily. “I asked your opinion—or, rather, gave you my opinion—of Miss Clotilde Dymcox, and you favour me with a pack of impertinent insinuations regarding the family at Hampton Court.” Mr Elbraham went angrily out into the hall to don his light and tight overcoat and grey hat, and walk down to the station.As Litton heard the door close he sank back in his chair at the writing-table, and laughed silently and heartily.“Ha, ha, ha!” he ejaculated; “and this is your clever financier—this is your man far above the ordinary race in shrewdness! Why am I not wealthy, too, when I can turn the scoundrel round my finger, clever as he believes he is? Clever, talented, great! Why, if I metaphorically pull his tail like one would that of a pig, saying, ‘You shan’t go that way!’ he grunts savagely, and makes straight for the hole.”Arthur Litton took one of Mr Elbraham’s choice cigars from his case, deliberately pitched aside the letters he had to answer, struck a light, placed his heels upon the table, and, balancing his chair upon two legs, began to smoke.“Well, so far so good,” he said at last, as he watched the aromatic rings of smoke ascend towards the ceiling. “I suppose it is so. Mr Elbraham is one of the cleverest men on ’Change, and he manages the money-making world. I can manage Mr Elbraham.Ergo, I am a cleverer man than the great financier; but he makes his thousands where I make shillings and pence. Why is this?”The answer was all smoke; and satisfactory as that aromatic, sedative vapour was in the mouth, it was lighter than the air upon which it rose, and Arthur Litton continued his soliloquising.“I’m afraid that I shall never make any money upon ’Change, or by bolstering up bad companies, and robbing the widow, the orphan, the retired officer, and the poor parson of their savings. It is not my way. I should have no compunction if they were fools enough to throw me their money. I should take it and spend it, as Elbraham and a score more such scoundrels spend theirs. What does it matter? What is the difference to him between having a few hundred pounds more or less in this world? They talk about starvation when their incomes are more than mine. They say they are beggared when they have hundreds left. Genteel poverty is one of the greatest shams under the sun.”“Not a bad cigar,” he said, after a fresh pause. “He has that virtue in him, certainly, he does get good cigars; and money! money! money! how he does get money—a scoundrel!—while I get none, or next to none. Well, well, I think I am pulling the strings in a way that should satisfy the most exacting of Lady Littletowns, and it is ridiculous how the scoundrel of a puppet dances to the tune I play.”He laughed in a way that would have made his fortune had he played Mephistopheles upon the stage. Then, carefully removing a good inch and a half of ash:“And now, my sweet old match-maker,” he continued, “will you keep your promise? I am a poor unlucky devil, and the only way to save me is by settling me with a rich wife such as she promises.“Hum, yes!” he said softly, “a wife with a good fortune. Elbraham takes one without a penny, for the sake of her looks; the aunts sell the girl for the sake of his money. A cheerful marriage, and,” he added cynically, “as the French say,après?”“Take my case, as I am in a humour for philosophising. I am to be introduced to a rich lady, and shall marry her for the sake of the fortune. She will marry me for my youth, I suppose, and good looks—I suppose I may say good looks,” he continued, rising, crossing the room, and gazing in the glass. “Yes, Arthur, you may add good looks, for you are a gentlemanly fellow, and just of an age to attract a woman who is decidedly off colour.”He paused, rested his elbows upon the chimney-piece, and kept on puffing little clouds of smoke against the mirror, watching them curiously as they obliterated his reflection for the moment, and then rolled slowly up, singularly close to the glass.He did this again and again, watching his dimly-seen reflection till it had grown plain, and then he laughed as if amused.“Yes, I am decidedly good-looking, and I say it without vanity,” he continued, “for I am looking at myself from a marketable point of view. And the lady? Suppose I always look at her through the clouds, for she will be elderly and plain—of that I may rest assured; but I can gild her; she will be gilded for me, and as the Scots say, ‘a’ cats are grey i’ the dark!’ so why should I mind? If I wed the fairest woman under the sun I should forget her looks in a week, while other men worried me by their admiration. So there it is, ladies and gentlemen; the fair Clotilde and the manly Arthur Litton about to be sold by Society’s prize-auction to the highest bidders, and this is the land where slavery is unknown—the land of the free! This, ladies and gentlemen, is Christian England!”He seemed to be highly amused at this idea, and laughed and gazed at himself in the glass as if perfectly satisfied that his face would make a change in his lot, after which he threw away the remains of the cigar he was smoking, and taking a bunch of keys from his pocket, he walked across to Elbraham’s cabinet, which he unlocked, and helped himself to a couple of the best Rothschilds, one of which he lit.Arthur Litton was very thoughtful now, and it took some time to get to work; but he finished the task entrusted to him, and then, after a little consideration, he rose to go, making his way to Lady Littletown’s.Her ladyship was at home, in the conservatory, the footman said; and treating the visitor as an old friend, he opened the drawing-room door, and Litton walked in unannounced.Her ladyship was busy, in a pair of white kid gloves, snipping off faded leaves and flowers, and she left her occupation to greet her visitor.“Well, Arturo, no bad news, I hope?”“Only that the great Potiphar, the man of money, is completely hooked, and determined to embark upon the troubled sea of matrimony.”“Is that bad news?” said her ladyship. “I call it a triumph of diplomacy, Arturo. Spoils from the enemy!”“Then you are satisfied?”“More than satisfied, my clever diplomat, and you shall have your reward.”“When?”Lady Littletown snipped here and snipped there, treating some of her choicest flowers in a way that would have maddened her head gardener had he seen, for unfaded flowers dropped here and there beneath the stands in a way that showed her ladyship to be highly excited.“Now look here, Arturo,” she exclaimed at last, as she turned upon him, and seemed to menace him with her sharp-pointed scissors, which poked and snipped at him till a bystander might have imagined that Lady Littletown took him for a flower whose head gave her offence—“Now look here, Arturo, do you want to make me angry?”“No: indeed no,” he cried deprecatingly.“Then why do you ask me such a question as that?”“Well,” he said, smiling, “is it not reasonable that I should feel impatient?”“Perhaps so. I’ll grant it; but, my good boy, you must be a man of the world; and now that we are upon that subject, let us understand one another.”“By all means,” assented Litton eagerly.“First of all, though, I cannot worry myself with too much work at once. I have those two girls to marry, and I must get that out of hand before I undertake more.”“Exactly; and all is now in train.”“Many a slip, Arturo, ’twixt cup and lip; but we shall see—we shall see.”Her ladyship went on snipping vigorously.“I want you to understand me. To speak plainly, Arturo, you are a gentleman of great polish.”“Thanks,” he said, bowing.“And a good presence.”He bowed again.“You are not quite handsome, but there is an aristocratic, well-bred look about you that would recommend you to any lady—and I mean you to marry a lady.”“Yes, by all means. Pray don’t find me a young person who might pass for a relative of the great Elbraham.”“My good boy, there is no such party in the field; and if there were, I should not allow you to try and turn up that haughty aristocratic nose at her. A hundred thousand pounds, dear Arturo, would gild over a great many blemishes.”“True, O queen!” he said, smiling.“As I said before, let us understand one another. You must not be too particular. Suppose the lady chances to be old?”Litton made a grimace.“And rich—very rich?”“That would make amends,” he said with a smile.“I could marry you myself, Arturo,” she continued, looking very much attenuated and hawk-like as she smiled at him in a laughing way.“Why not?” he cried eagerly, as the richly-furnished home and income opened out to his mind ease and comfort for life.“Because I am too old,” she said, smiling at the young man’s impetuosity.“Oh, no,” he cried; “you would be priceless in my eyes.”“Hold your tongue, Arturo, and don’t be a baby,” said her ladyship. “I tell you I am too old to be foolish enough to marry. There are plenty of older women who inveigh against matrimony, and profess to have grown too sensible and too wise to embark in it, who would give their ears to win a husband.”“Why should not Lady Littletown be placed in this list?” said Litton meaningly.“Because I tell you she is too old in a worldly way. No, my dear boy, when an elderly woman marries, it is generally because she is infatuated with the idea of possessing a young husband. She thinks for the moment that he woos her for her worldly store; but she is so flattered by his attentions that these outweigh all else, and she jumps at the opportunity of changing her state.”“Again, then,” he whispered impressively, “why should not this apply to Lady Littletown?”“Silence, foolish boy!” she cried, menacing him again with the scissors, and holding up her flower-basket as if to catch the snipped-off head. “I tell you I am too old in a worldly way, When a matter-of-fact woman reaches my years, and knows that she has gradually been lessening her capital in the bank of life, she tries to get as much as possible in the way of enjoyment out of what is left.”“Exactly,” he cried eagerly.“She takes matters coolly and weighs them fairly before her. ‘If,’ she says, ‘I take the contents of this scale I shall get so much pleasure. If I choose the contents of this other scale, I shall again obtain so much.’”“Well, what then?” said Litton, for her ladyship paused in the act of decapitating a magnificent Japan lily.“What then? Foolish boy! Why, of course she chooses the scale that will give her most pleasure.”“Naturally,” he said.“Then that is what I do.”“But would not life with a man who would idolise you be far beyond any other worldly pleasure?”“Yes,” said her ladyship drily; “but give me credit,mio caroArturo, for not being such an old idiot as to believe that you would idolise me, as you call it.”“Ah, you don’t know,” he cried.“What you would be guilty of to obtain a good settlement in life, my dear boy?”“You insult me,” he cried angrily.“Oh no, my impetuous young friend; but really, Arturo, that was well done. Capital! It would be winning with some ladies. Rest assured that you shall have a rich wife. As for me, I have had you in the scale twice over. I did once think of marrying you.”“You did?” he cried with real surprise.“To be sure I did,” she said quietly. “Why not? I said to myself, ‘I am careless of the opinion of the world, and shall do as I please;’ and I pictured out my home with you, adistinguéman, at the head.”“You did?” he said excitedly.“Of course I did. And then I pictured it as it is, with Lady Littletown, a power in her way, a well-known character in society, whose word has its influence, and one who can sway the destinies of many, in many ways, in the world.”“No; say in one,” he exclaimed rather bitterly—“in the matrimonial world.”“As you will,cherArthur,” replied her ladyship. “You see, I am frank with you. I weighed it all carefully, as I said, and weighed it once again, to be sure that I was making no mistake, and the result was dead against change.”“Highly complimentary to me!”“A very excellent thing for you, my dear boy; for you would have led a wretched life.”“Assuming that your ladyship’s charms had conquered my youthful, ardent heart?” he said.“Silly boy! you are trying to be sarcastic,” said Lady Littletown. “Pish! I am too thick-skinned to mind it in the least. Be reasonable and listen, dear brother-in-arms.”“Why not lover-in-arms?” he cried quickly—“in those arms.”Lady Littletown placed her scissors in the hand that held the basket, raised her square gold eyeglass, and looked at her visitor.“Well done, Arturo! excellent,mon général! Why, you would carry the stoutest fort I set you to attack in a few days. I have not heard anything so clever as that apt remark of yours for months. Really,” she continued, dropping the glass and resuming her scissors, “I am growing quite proud of you—I am indeed.”“And so you mock at me,” he said angrily.“Not I, Arturo; you were only practising; and it was very smart. No, my dear, it would not do for you; and I tell you frankly, you have had a very narrow escape.”“Why?” he said; and his eyes glanced round at the rich place with its many indications of wealth, and as he noted these there came to his memory his last unpaid bill.“Because I have a horrible temper, and I am a terrible tyrant. Of course you would have married me for my money and position.”“Don’t say that,” cried Litton.“Don’t be a donkey, Arthur,mon cher,” said the lady. “Well, to proceed: I should have married you because you were young and handsome.”“Your ladyship seemed to indicate just now that I was not handsome,” said Litton.“Did I? Well, I retract. I do think you handsome, Arturo, and I should have been horribly jealous of you as soon as I found that you were paying your court elsewhere.”“Does your ladyship still imagine that I could be such a scoundrel?” cried Litton, in indignant tones.The square golden eyeglass went up again.“Excellent, Arturo, my dear boy! You would have made a fortune upon the stage in tragi-comedy. Nothing could have been finer than that declaration. Really, I am proud of you! But I should have led you a horrible life, and been ready to poison you if I found you out in deception.”“Lady Littletown, I hope I am a gentleman,” said the visitor haughtily.“I hope you are, I’m sure, my dear boy,” said her ladyship, smiling at him serenely. “But, as you see, I could not have put up with my money being lavished upon others; and hence I thought it better to let someone else have you.”“But, my dear Lady Littletown—”“Ah, tut, tut, tut! no rhapsodies, please, my sweet ingenuous Lubin. I am no Phyllis now, believe me, and all this is waste of words. There, be patient, my dear boy, and you shall have a rich wife, and she shall be as young as I can manage; but, mind, I do not promise beauty. Do you hear? Are the raptures at an end?”“Oh yes, if you like,” he said bitterly.“I do like, my dear boy; so they are at an end. Really, Arturo, I feel quite motherly towards you, and, believe me, I shall not rest until I see you well mated.”“Thanks, my dear Lady Littletown,” he said; “and with that, I suppose, I am to be contented.”“Yes, sir; and you ought to be very thankful, Do you hear?”“Yes,” he replied, taking and kissing one of her ladyship’s gardening gloves. “And now I must be for sayingau revoir.”“Au revoir, cher garçon!” replied her ladyship; and she followed her visitor out of the conservatory into the drawing-room, and rang the bell for the servant in attendance to show him out.“It wouldn’t have been a bad slice of luck to have married her and had this place. But, good heavens, what an old hag!”“I should have been an idiot to marry him,” said her ladyship, as soon as she was alone. “He is very handsome and gentlemanly and nice; but he would have ruined me, I am sure of that. Ah well, the sooner I find him someone else with a good income the better. Let him squander that. Why—”She stopped short.“How stupid of me! The very thing! Lady Anna Maria Morton has just come in for her brother’s estate.”Lady Littletown stood thinking.“She is fifty if she is a day, perhaps fifty-five, and as tremulous as Isabella Dymcox. But what of that? Dear Anna Maria! I have not called upon her for a fortnight. How wrong! I shall be obliged to have a littlepartie carréeto dinner. Let me see—Lady Anna Maria, Arthur, myself, and—dear, dear—dear, dear me! Who shall I have that is not stupid enough to spoil sport?”She walked about in a fidgety manner, and then picked up her card-basket, raised the square gold eyeglass, and turned the cards over in an impatient manner.“Not one—not one!” she cried reluctantly. “Never mind; she shall come to atête-à-têtedinner, and Arthur shall drop in by accident, and stop. Dear boy, how I do toil and slave on his behalf! But stay,” she added, after a pause; “shall I wait and get the Dymcox business over first? No; what matters? I am diplomat enough to carry on both at once; and, by-the-bye, I must not let that little military boy slip through my fingers, for he really is a prize. Taken with Marie; but that won’t do,” she continued. “Moorpark must have her, and I dare say somebody will turn up.”She took her seat at the table then, and began to write a tiny note upon delicately-scented paper. The first words after the date were: “My dearest Anna Maria,” and she ended with: “Your very affectionate friend.”
Mr Elbraham had not been long making up his mind to eschew shilly-shallying, and to propose at once. He was a clever man of business, and no one knew better than he how to work a few shares upon the Stock Exchange, and float a company so as to pour thousands into the laps of its promoters; but he had a weak side, and his late action was taken a good deal on account of the opposition he met with from his private secretary.
“Going to dine with ‘the maids of honour’ at Hampton Court!” said this latter gentleman, looking up in astonishment as his principal announced his intention; “why, you grumbled at having to go to Lady Littletown’s the other day, and she does give good dinners.”
“Capital,” said the financier, smacking his lips.
“But you won’t get anything fit to eat at the Palace.”
“My object is to get into better society,” said the financier promptly; “and the Dymcoxes are people of position. Of course, you know I met them there.”
“Ah, to be sure; so you did. Well, they certainly belong to a good family.”
“Yes,” said Mr Elbraham, strutting pompously up and down the room. “Lovely girl that Miss Clotilde!”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Arthur Litton; “she is handsome, certainly.”
“Humph! I should think she is, sir.”
“But I’ve seen many finer women,” continued Litton. “Not my style of girl at all.”
“Should think not, indeed,” said Elbraham hotly. “Bah, sir! stuff, sir! rubbish, sir! What do you know about handsome women?”
“Well, certainly,” said Litton humbly, and with a smile, as the financier walked away from him down the room—a smile which was replaced by a look as serious as that of the proverbial judge, when the great man turned; “I suppose my opinion is not worth much.”
“I should think not, indeed. I tell you she is magnificent.”
“Oh, nonsense, my dear sir,” said Litton warmly; “handsome if you like, but magnificent—no! You know dozens of finer women.”
“Maybe, maybe,” said the financier.
Litton paused for a few moments, tapping his teeth as if undecided, till his chief paused and looked at him curiously.
“Well, what is it?” he said.
“Look here, Mr Elbraham,” said Litton, “I suppose we are not very good friends?”
“H’m, I don’t know. You are in my pay,” said the financier coarsely, “so you ought to be one of my best friends.”
“You’ve said too many sharp things to me, Mr Elbraham, to make me feel warmly towards you; but, all the same, I confess that you have done me some very good turns in money matters; and I hope, though I take your pay, that I am too much of a gentleman to stand by and see anyone take a mean advantage of a weakness on your part.”
“Weakness? My part!” said the financier fiercely, as if the very idea of his being weak was absurd.
“Yes, sir, weakness. Look here, Mr Elbraham, I should not like to see you taken in.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Mean?” said Litton. “Well, Mr Elbraham, I’m not afraid of you; so whether you are offended or not, I shall speak out.”
“Then speak out, sir, and don’t shilly-shally.”
“Well, sir, it seems to me that there’s a good deal of fortune-hunting about. Those Dymcox people have good blood, certainly; but they’re as poor as rats, and I’ll be bound to say nothing would please the old aunts better than hooking you, with one of those girls for a bait.”
“Will you have the goodness to reply to that batch of letters, Mr Litton?” said Elbraham haughtily. “I asked your opinion—or, rather, gave you my opinion—of Miss Clotilde Dymcox, and you favour me with a pack of impertinent insinuations regarding the family at Hampton Court.” Mr Elbraham went angrily out into the hall to don his light and tight overcoat and grey hat, and walk down to the station.
As Litton heard the door close he sank back in his chair at the writing-table, and laughed silently and heartily.
“Ha, ha, ha!” he ejaculated; “and this is your clever financier—this is your man far above the ordinary race in shrewdness! Why am I not wealthy, too, when I can turn the scoundrel round my finger, clever as he believes he is? Clever, talented, great! Why, if I metaphorically pull his tail like one would that of a pig, saying, ‘You shan’t go that way!’ he grunts savagely, and makes straight for the hole.”
Arthur Litton took one of Mr Elbraham’s choice cigars from his case, deliberately pitched aside the letters he had to answer, struck a light, placed his heels upon the table, and, balancing his chair upon two legs, began to smoke.
“Well, so far so good,” he said at last, as he watched the aromatic rings of smoke ascend towards the ceiling. “I suppose it is so. Mr Elbraham is one of the cleverest men on ’Change, and he manages the money-making world. I can manage Mr Elbraham.Ergo, I am a cleverer man than the great financier; but he makes his thousands where I make shillings and pence. Why is this?”
The answer was all smoke; and satisfactory as that aromatic, sedative vapour was in the mouth, it was lighter than the air upon which it rose, and Arthur Litton continued his soliloquising.
“I’m afraid that I shall never make any money upon ’Change, or by bolstering up bad companies, and robbing the widow, the orphan, the retired officer, and the poor parson of their savings. It is not my way. I should have no compunction if they were fools enough to throw me their money. I should take it and spend it, as Elbraham and a score more such scoundrels spend theirs. What does it matter? What is the difference to him between having a few hundred pounds more or less in this world? They talk about starvation when their incomes are more than mine. They say they are beggared when they have hundreds left. Genteel poverty is one of the greatest shams under the sun.”
“Not a bad cigar,” he said, after a fresh pause. “He has that virtue in him, certainly, he does get good cigars; and money! money! money! how he does get money—a scoundrel!—while I get none, or next to none. Well, well, I think I am pulling the strings in a way that should satisfy the most exacting of Lady Littletowns, and it is ridiculous how the scoundrel of a puppet dances to the tune I play.”
He laughed in a way that would have made his fortune had he played Mephistopheles upon the stage. Then, carefully removing a good inch and a half of ash:
“And now, my sweet old match-maker,” he continued, “will you keep your promise? I am a poor unlucky devil, and the only way to save me is by settling me with a rich wife such as she promises.
“Hum, yes!” he said softly, “a wife with a good fortune. Elbraham takes one without a penny, for the sake of her looks; the aunts sell the girl for the sake of his money. A cheerful marriage, and,” he added cynically, “as the French say,après?”
“Take my case, as I am in a humour for philosophising. I am to be introduced to a rich lady, and shall marry her for the sake of the fortune. She will marry me for my youth, I suppose, and good looks—I suppose I may say good looks,” he continued, rising, crossing the room, and gazing in the glass. “Yes, Arthur, you may add good looks, for you are a gentlemanly fellow, and just of an age to attract a woman who is decidedly off colour.”
He paused, rested his elbows upon the chimney-piece, and kept on puffing little clouds of smoke against the mirror, watching them curiously as they obliterated his reflection for the moment, and then rolled slowly up, singularly close to the glass.
He did this again and again, watching his dimly-seen reflection till it had grown plain, and then he laughed as if amused.
“Yes, I am decidedly good-looking, and I say it without vanity,” he continued, “for I am looking at myself from a marketable point of view. And the lady? Suppose I always look at her through the clouds, for she will be elderly and plain—of that I may rest assured; but I can gild her; she will be gilded for me, and as the Scots say, ‘a’ cats are grey i’ the dark!’ so why should I mind? If I wed the fairest woman under the sun I should forget her looks in a week, while other men worried me by their admiration. So there it is, ladies and gentlemen; the fair Clotilde and the manly Arthur Litton about to be sold by Society’s prize-auction to the highest bidders, and this is the land where slavery is unknown—the land of the free! This, ladies and gentlemen, is Christian England!”
He seemed to be highly amused at this idea, and laughed and gazed at himself in the glass as if perfectly satisfied that his face would make a change in his lot, after which he threw away the remains of the cigar he was smoking, and taking a bunch of keys from his pocket, he walked across to Elbraham’s cabinet, which he unlocked, and helped himself to a couple of the best Rothschilds, one of which he lit.
Arthur Litton was very thoughtful now, and it took some time to get to work; but he finished the task entrusted to him, and then, after a little consideration, he rose to go, making his way to Lady Littletown’s.
Her ladyship was at home, in the conservatory, the footman said; and treating the visitor as an old friend, he opened the drawing-room door, and Litton walked in unannounced.
Her ladyship was busy, in a pair of white kid gloves, snipping off faded leaves and flowers, and she left her occupation to greet her visitor.
“Well, Arturo, no bad news, I hope?”
“Only that the great Potiphar, the man of money, is completely hooked, and determined to embark upon the troubled sea of matrimony.”
“Is that bad news?” said her ladyship. “I call it a triumph of diplomacy, Arturo. Spoils from the enemy!”
“Then you are satisfied?”
“More than satisfied, my clever diplomat, and you shall have your reward.”
“When?”
Lady Littletown snipped here and snipped there, treating some of her choicest flowers in a way that would have maddened her head gardener had he seen, for unfaded flowers dropped here and there beneath the stands in a way that showed her ladyship to be highly excited.
“Now look here, Arturo,” she exclaimed at last, as she turned upon him, and seemed to menace him with her sharp-pointed scissors, which poked and snipped at him till a bystander might have imagined that Lady Littletown took him for a flower whose head gave her offence—“Now look here, Arturo, do you want to make me angry?”
“No: indeed no,” he cried deprecatingly.
“Then why do you ask me such a question as that?”
“Well,” he said, smiling, “is it not reasonable that I should feel impatient?”
“Perhaps so. I’ll grant it; but, my good boy, you must be a man of the world; and now that we are upon that subject, let us understand one another.”
“By all means,” assented Litton eagerly.
“First of all, though, I cannot worry myself with too much work at once. I have those two girls to marry, and I must get that out of hand before I undertake more.”
“Exactly; and all is now in train.”
“Many a slip, Arturo, ’twixt cup and lip; but we shall see—we shall see.”
Her ladyship went on snipping vigorously.
“I want you to understand me. To speak plainly, Arturo, you are a gentleman of great polish.”
“Thanks,” he said, bowing.
“And a good presence.”
He bowed again.
“You are not quite handsome, but there is an aristocratic, well-bred look about you that would recommend you to any lady—and I mean you to marry a lady.”
“Yes, by all means. Pray don’t find me a young person who might pass for a relative of the great Elbraham.”
“My good boy, there is no such party in the field; and if there were, I should not allow you to try and turn up that haughty aristocratic nose at her. A hundred thousand pounds, dear Arturo, would gild over a great many blemishes.”
“True, O queen!” he said, smiling.
“As I said before, let us understand one another. You must not be too particular. Suppose the lady chances to be old?”
Litton made a grimace.
“And rich—very rich?”
“That would make amends,” he said with a smile.
“I could marry you myself, Arturo,” she continued, looking very much attenuated and hawk-like as she smiled at him in a laughing way.
“Why not?” he cried eagerly, as the richly-furnished home and income opened out to his mind ease and comfort for life.
“Because I am too old,” she said, smiling at the young man’s impetuosity.
“Oh, no,” he cried; “you would be priceless in my eyes.”
“Hold your tongue, Arturo, and don’t be a baby,” said her ladyship. “I tell you I am too old to be foolish enough to marry. There are plenty of older women who inveigh against matrimony, and profess to have grown too sensible and too wise to embark in it, who would give their ears to win a husband.”
“Why should not Lady Littletown be placed in this list?” said Litton meaningly.
“Because I tell you she is too old in a worldly way. No, my dear boy, when an elderly woman marries, it is generally because she is infatuated with the idea of possessing a young husband. She thinks for the moment that he woos her for her worldly store; but she is so flattered by his attentions that these outweigh all else, and she jumps at the opportunity of changing her state.”
“Again, then,” he whispered impressively, “why should not this apply to Lady Littletown?”
“Silence, foolish boy!” she cried, menacing him again with the scissors, and holding up her flower-basket as if to catch the snipped-off head. “I tell you I am too old in a worldly way, When a matter-of-fact woman reaches my years, and knows that she has gradually been lessening her capital in the bank of life, she tries to get as much as possible in the way of enjoyment out of what is left.”
“Exactly,” he cried eagerly.
“She takes matters coolly and weighs them fairly before her. ‘If,’ she says, ‘I take the contents of this scale I shall get so much pleasure. If I choose the contents of this other scale, I shall again obtain so much.’”
“Well, what then?” said Litton, for her ladyship paused in the act of decapitating a magnificent Japan lily.
“What then? Foolish boy! Why, of course she chooses the scale that will give her most pleasure.”
“Naturally,” he said.
“Then that is what I do.”
“But would not life with a man who would idolise you be far beyond any other worldly pleasure?”
“Yes,” said her ladyship drily; “but give me credit,mio caroArturo, for not being such an old idiot as to believe that you would idolise me, as you call it.”
“Ah, you don’t know,” he cried.
“What you would be guilty of to obtain a good settlement in life, my dear boy?”
“You insult me,” he cried angrily.
“Oh no, my impetuous young friend; but really, Arturo, that was well done. Capital! It would be winning with some ladies. Rest assured that you shall have a rich wife. As for me, I have had you in the scale twice over. I did once think of marrying you.”
“You did?” he cried with real surprise.
“To be sure I did,” she said quietly. “Why not? I said to myself, ‘I am careless of the opinion of the world, and shall do as I please;’ and I pictured out my home with you, adistinguéman, at the head.”
“You did?” he said excitedly.
“Of course I did. And then I pictured it as it is, with Lady Littletown, a power in her way, a well-known character in society, whose word has its influence, and one who can sway the destinies of many, in many ways, in the world.”
“No; say in one,” he exclaimed rather bitterly—“in the matrimonial world.”
“As you will,cherArthur,” replied her ladyship. “You see, I am frank with you. I weighed it all carefully, as I said, and weighed it once again, to be sure that I was making no mistake, and the result was dead against change.”
“Highly complimentary to me!”
“A very excellent thing for you, my dear boy; for you would have led a wretched life.”
“Assuming that your ladyship’s charms had conquered my youthful, ardent heart?” he said.
“Silly boy! you are trying to be sarcastic,” said Lady Littletown. “Pish! I am too thick-skinned to mind it in the least. Be reasonable and listen, dear brother-in-arms.”
“Why not lover-in-arms?” he cried quickly—“in those arms.”
Lady Littletown placed her scissors in the hand that held the basket, raised her square gold eyeglass, and looked at her visitor.
“Well done, Arturo! excellent,mon général! Why, you would carry the stoutest fort I set you to attack in a few days. I have not heard anything so clever as that apt remark of yours for months. Really,” she continued, dropping the glass and resuming her scissors, “I am growing quite proud of you—I am indeed.”
“And so you mock at me,” he said angrily.
“Not I, Arturo; you were only practising; and it was very smart. No, my dear, it would not do for you; and I tell you frankly, you have had a very narrow escape.”
“Why?” he said; and his eyes glanced round at the rich place with its many indications of wealth, and as he noted these there came to his memory his last unpaid bill.
“Because I have a horrible temper, and I am a terrible tyrant. Of course you would have married me for my money and position.”
“Don’t say that,” cried Litton.
“Don’t be a donkey, Arthur,mon cher,” said the lady. “Well, to proceed: I should have married you because you were young and handsome.”
“Your ladyship seemed to indicate just now that I was not handsome,” said Litton.
“Did I? Well, I retract. I do think you handsome, Arturo, and I should have been horribly jealous of you as soon as I found that you were paying your court elsewhere.”
“Does your ladyship still imagine that I could be such a scoundrel?” cried Litton, in indignant tones.
The square golden eyeglass went up again.
“Excellent, Arturo, my dear boy! You would have made a fortune upon the stage in tragi-comedy. Nothing could have been finer than that declaration. Really, I am proud of you! But I should have led you a horrible life, and been ready to poison you if I found you out in deception.”
“Lady Littletown, I hope I am a gentleman,” said the visitor haughtily.
“I hope you are, I’m sure, my dear boy,” said her ladyship, smiling at him serenely. “But, as you see, I could not have put up with my money being lavished upon others; and hence I thought it better to let someone else have you.”
“But, my dear Lady Littletown—”
“Ah, tut, tut, tut! no rhapsodies, please, my sweet ingenuous Lubin. I am no Phyllis now, believe me, and all this is waste of words. There, be patient, my dear boy, and you shall have a rich wife, and she shall be as young as I can manage; but, mind, I do not promise beauty. Do you hear? Are the raptures at an end?”
“Oh yes, if you like,” he said bitterly.
“I do like, my dear boy; so they are at an end. Really, Arturo, I feel quite motherly towards you, and, believe me, I shall not rest until I see you well mated.”
“Thanks, my dear Lady Littletown,” he said; “and with that, I suppose, I am to be contented.”
“Yes, sir; and you ought to be very thankful, Do you hear?”
“Yes,” he replied, taking and kissing one of her ladyship’s gardening gloves. “And now I must be for sayingau revoir.”
“Au revoir, cher garçon!” replied her ladyship; and she followed her visitor out of the conservatory into the drawing-room, and rang the bell for the servant in attendance to show him out.
“It wouldn’t have been a bad slice of luck to have married her and had this place. But, good heavens, what an old hag!”
“I should have been an idiot to marry him,” said her ladyship, as soon as she was alone. “He is very handsome and gentlemanly and nice; but he would have ruined me, I am sure of that. Ah well, the sooner I find him someone else with a good income the better. Let him squander that. Why—”
She stopped short.
“How stupid of me! The very thing! Lady Anna Maria Morton has just come in for her brother’s estate.”
Lady Littletown stood thinking.
“She is fifty if she is a day, perhaps fifty-five, and as tremulous as Isabella Dymcox. But what of that? Dear Anna Maria! I have not called upon her for a fortnight. How wrong! I shall be obliged to have a littlepartie carréeto dinner. Let me see—Lady Anna Maria, Arthur, myself, and—dear, dear—dear, dear me! Who shall I have that is not stupid enough to spoil sport?”
She walked about in a fidgety manner, and then picked up her card-basket, raised the square gold eyeglass, and turned the cards over in an impatient manner.
“Not one—not one!” she cried reluctantly. “Never mind; she shall come to atête-à-têtedinner, and Arthur shall drop in by accident, and stop. Dear boy, how I do toil and slave on his behalf! But stay,” she added, after a pause; “shall I wait and get the Dymcox business over first? No; what matters? I am diplomat enough to carry on both at once; and, by-the-bye, I must not let that little military boy slip through my fingers, for he really is a prize. Taken with Marie; but that won’t do,” she continued. “Moorpark must have her, and I dare say somebody will turn up.”
She took her seat at the table then, and began to write a tiny note upon delicately-scented paper. The first words after the date were: “My dearest Anna Maria,” and she ended with: “Your very affectionate friend.”
Volume Two—Chapter Twelve.A Matter-of-Fact Match.Dick Millet received a note in his uncle’s crabbed hand one morning at Hampton Court, obtained leave, and hurried up to town, calling at Grosvenor Square to hear the last news about Gertrude, but finding none.On arriving at Wimpole Street, Vidler opened the door to the visitor, and smiled as he did so in rather a peculiar way.“Can I speak to my uncle?” said Dick importantly. And he was shown up into the drawing-room, which seemed more gloomy now, lit as it was by four wax-candles, which were lost, as it were, in a great mist of old-time air, that had been shut up in that room till it had grown into a faded and yellow atmosphere carefully preserved from the bleaching properties of the sun.The little opening was to his right, with the white hand visible on the ledge; but Dick hardly saw it, for, as he entered, Gertrude ran to his arms, to fall sobbing on his neck, while John Huish came forward offering his hand.“Then it was you, John Huish, after all?” Dick exclaimed angrily, as he placed his own hand behind his back.“Yes, it was I. What else could I do, forbidden as I was to come to the house? Come, my dear Dick, don’t be hard upon me now.”“But,” exclaimed Dick in a puzzled way, “how was all this managed?”“Shall we let that rest?” said Huish, smiling. “Neither Gertrude nor I are very proud of our subterfuges. But come, we are brothers now. We can count upon you, can we not, to make friends with her ladyship.”“I—don’t know,” said Dick quietly, for his mind was busy with the thoughts of the awkward reports he had heard concerning Huish and his position at various clubs, and he asked himself whether he should be the friend and advocate of a man who was declared to be little better than a blackleg.“Surely I can count upon you,” said Huish, after a pause.“Suppose we step down into the dining-room,” said Dick stiffly; but he gave his sister an encouraging smile as she caught his hand.“Dick,” she whispered, “what does this mean?”“Only a little clearing up between John Huish and me, dear,” he said. “After that, I dare say I shall be able to tell you I’m glad you’re his wife.”Gertrude smiled, and Huish followed down to the dining-room, which, lit by one candle, looked like a vault. Arrived here, though, Dick turned sharply upon his brother-in-law.“Now, look here, John Huish,” he said, “I won’t quarrel about the past and this clandestine match, for perhaps, if I had been situated as you were, I should have done the same; but there is something I want cleared up.”“Let us clear it up at once then,” said Huish, smiling. “What is it?”“Well, there are some sinister reports about you—you see, I speak plainly.”“Yes, of course. Go on.”“Well, they say commonly that you have been playing out of the square at the clubs; that you’ve been expelled from two, and that your conduct has been little better than that of a blackleg. John Huish, as a gentleman and my brother-in-law, how much of this is true? Stop a moment,” he added hastily. “I know, old man, what it is myself to be pinched for money, and how a fellow might be tempted to do anything shady to get some together to keep up appearances. If there has been anything queer it must be forgiven; but you must give me your word as a man that for the future all shall be right.”“My dear Dick,” cried Huish, “I give you my word that all in the future shall be square, as you term it; and I tell you this, that if any man had spoken such falsehoods about my wife’s brother, I should have knocked him down. There isn’t a word of truth in these reports, though I must confess they have worried me a great deal. Now, will you shake hands?”“That I will,” cried Dick eagerly; “and I tell you now that I am glad that you have thrown dust in our eyes as you have. I always liked you, Huish, and you were about the only man from whom I never liked to borrow money.”“Why?” said Huish, smiling.“Because I was afraid of losing a friend. Come up now, for Gertrude will be in a fidget to know what we have been saying.—Gertrude, my dear,” he said as they re-entered the drawing-room, “it’s all right.”An hour later Dick parted from the young couple at the little house they had taken in Westbourne Road, and cabbed back, to send her ladyship into a fainting fit by the announcement that his sister and her husband had been at his uncle’s.“For,” said Lady Millet, “I can never forgive Gertrude; and as to that dreadful man Huish, in marrying him she has disgraced herself beyond the power to redeem her lot. Ah me! and these are the children I have nurtured in my bosom.”It was rather hard work for Dick Millet, with his own love affairs in a state of “check,” with no probability of “mate,” but he felt that he must act; and in his newly assumed character of head of the family he determined to go and try to smooth matters over at Chesham Place, and took a hansom to see Frank Morrison, who was now back at his own house, but alone, and who surlily pointed to a chair as he sat back pale and nervous of aspect, wrapped in a dressing-gown.“Look here, Frank,” said Dick, sitting down, and helping himself to a cigar, “we’re brothers-in-law, and I’m not going to quarrel. I’ve come for the other thing.”“My cigars, seemingly,” said the other.“Yes; they’re not bad. But look here, old fellow, light up; I want to talk to you.”“If you want to borrow twenty pounds, say so, and I’ll draw you a cheque.”“Hang your cheque! I didn’t come to borrow money. Light up.”Morrison snatched up a cigar, bit off the end, and lit it, threw himself back in his chair, and began to smoke quickly.“Go on,” he said. “What is it?”“Wait a minute or two,” said Dick. “Smoke five minutes first.”Morrison muttered something unpleasant, but went on smoking, and at last Dick, who was sitting with his little legs dangling over the side of the chair, began.“Fact is,” he said, “I’m going to speak out. I shan’t quarrel, and I’m such a little chap that you can’t hit me.”“No; but I could throw you downstairs,” said Morrison, who was half amused, half annoyed by his visitor’s coming, though in his heart of hearts he longed to hear news of Renée.“I saw my uncle yesterday.”“Indeed! Poor old lunatic! What had he got to say?”“Ah, there you are wrong!” said Dick sharply. “He said something which you will own proved that he was no lunatic.”“What was it?” said Morrison coldly.“That you were a confounded scoundrel.”Frank Morrison jumped up in his chair, scowling angrily; but he threw himself back again with a contemptuous “Pish!”“Proves it, don’t it?”“Look here,” cried Morrison angrily, “I’ve had about enough of your family, so please finish your cigar and go.”“Shan’t. There, it’s no use to twist about. I’ve come on purpose to sit upon you.”“Look here,” cried Morrison sternly, “has your sister sent you?”“No. I’ve come of my own free will, as I tell you, to show you what a fool you are, and to try and bring you to your senses.”“You are very ready at calling people fools,” said Morrison, biting his nails.“Well, don’t you deserve to be called one for acting as you have acted? What did you do? Went mad after a woman who didn’t care asoufor you; neglected a dear, good girl who did care for you, and exposed her to the persecutions of a scoundrel who has no more principle than that.”He snapped his fingers, and, instead of firing up with rage, Morrison turned his face away and smoked furiously.“Now, isn’t that all true, Frank? Here, give me a light.”Morrison lit a spill, passed it to his brother-in-law, and sank back in his chair.“I say,” continued Dick, as he lit his cigar again, “isn’t it (puff) quite (puff) true?”“I suppose so,” said the other listlessly. “She never cared for me, though, Dick. That scoundrel and she were old flames.”“First, a lie; second, true,” said Dick quietly. “Renée is as good as gold; and when she found she was to be your wife, she accepted the inevitable and tried to do her duty, poor girl! She was already finding out what a bad one Malpas was.”“Curse him! don’t mention his name here!” cried Morrison savagely.“I say she was already finding out what a cursed scoundrel Malpas was when she married you.”“She encouraged his visits afterwards,” cried Morrison fiercely. “The villain owned it to me.”“And you didn’t thrust your fist down his throat?”Morrison got up and paced the room.“Look here, Frank, old fellow: you are beginning to find out what a donkey you have been. You are easy-going, and it’s no hard job to lead you away. Now tell me this: didn’t Malpas introduce you to a certain lady?”“Yes,” was the sulky reply.“Of course,” said Dick. “He takes you and moulds you like putty, introduces you to people so as to make your wife jealous, out of revenge for your supplanting him, and then tries to supplant you in turn.”“Dick Millet,” cried Morrison, “you mean well, but I can’t bear this. Either be silent or go. If I think of the scene on that dreadful night when I was sent home by a note written by that scoundrel of a brother-in-law of yours—”“Meaning yourself?” said Dick coolly.“I mean that double-faced, double-lived, double-dyed traitor, John Huish.”“What!”“The man who has fleeced me more than Malpas—curse him!—ever did.”“Gently! I won’t sit and hear John Huish maligned like that.”“Maligned!” cried Morrison, with a bitter laugh.“As if anyone could say anything bad enough of the scoundrel!”“Look here, Frank,” said Dick rather warmly, “I came here to try and do you a good turn, not to hear John Huish backbitten. He’s a good, true-hearted fellow, who has been slandered up and down, and he don’t deserve it.”Morrison sat up, stared at him in wonder, and then burst into a scornful laugh.“Dick Millet,” he exclaimed, “you called me a fool a little while ago. I won’t call you so, only ask you whether you don’t think you are one.”“I dare say I am,” said Dick sharply. “But look here, are you prepared to prove all this about John Huish?”“Every bit of it, and ten times as much,” said Morrison. “Why, this scoundrel won or cheated me of the money that paid for his wedding trip. He was with me till the last instant. Yes, and, as well as I can recollect, after he had got your sister away.”Dick’s cigar went out, and his forehead began to pucker up.“Look here,” he said: “you told me that he sent you the note that made you go home that night. Where were you?”“At a supper with some actresses.”“But John Huish was not there!”“Not there. Why, he was present with the lady who was his companion up to the time that he honoured your sister with his name. I believe he visits her now.”“I can’t stand this,” cried Dick, throwing away his cigar. “How a fellow who calls himself a man can play double in this way gets over me. Frank Morrison, if I did as much I should feel as if I had ‘liar’ written on my face, ready for my wife to see. It’s too much to believe about John Huish. I can’t—I won’t have it. Why, it would break poor little Gerty’s heart.”“Break her heart!” said Morrison bitterly. “Perhaps she would take a leaf out of her sister’s book.”“Confound you, Frank Morrison!” cried Dick, in a rage, as he jumped up and faced his brother-in-law. “I won’t stand it. My two sisters are as pure as angels. Do you dare to tell me to my face that you believe Renée guilty?”There was a dead silence in the room, and at last Frank Morrison spoke.“Dick,” he said, and his voice shook, “you are a good fellow. You are right: I am a fool and a scoundrel.”“Yes,” cried Dick; “but do you dare to tell me you believe that of Renée?”“I’d give half my life to know that she was innocent,” groaned Morrison.“You are a fool, then,” cried Dick, “or you’d know it. There, I didn’t come to quarrel, but to try and make you both happy; and now matters are ten times worse. But I won’t believe this about John.”“It’s true enough,” said Morrison sadly. “Poor little lass! I liked Gertrude. You should not have let that scoundrel have her.”“We have a weakness for letting our family marry scoundrels.”“Yes,” said Morrison, speaking without the slightest resentment; “she had better have had poor Lord Henry Moorpark.”“Oh!” said Dick. “There, I’m going. ’Day.”He moved towards the door, but Morrison stopped him.“Dick,” he said; “did Renée know you were coming?”“No,” was the curt reply.“Is she—is she still at your uncle’s?”“Yes, nearly always.”“Is she—is she well?”“No. She is ill. Heartsick and broken; and if what you say is true, she will soon have poor Gerty to keep her company.”Dick Millet hurried away from his brother-in-law’s house, pondering upon his own love matters, and telling himself that he had more to think of than he could bear.In happy ignorance of her ladyship’s prostrate state, John Huish, soon after his brother-in-law’s departure, hurried off to pay a hasty visit to his club, where he asked to see the secretary, and was informed that that gentleman was out. He threw himself into a cab, looking rather white and set of countenance as he had himself driven to Finsbury Square, where Daniel looked at him curiously as he ushered him into the doctor’s room.“My dear, dear boy, I am glad!” cried the doctor, dashing down his glasses. “You did the old lady, after all, and carried the little darling off. Bless her heart! Why, the gipsy! Oh, won’t I talk to her about this. That’s the best thing I’ve known for years. What does your father say?”“He wrote me word that he was very glad, and said he should write to Gertrude’s uncle.”“Ah, yes. H’m!” said the doctor. “Best thing, too. They were once very great friends, John.”“Yes, I have heard so,” said Huish. “I think Captain Millet loved my mother.”“H’m, yes,” said the doctor, nodding. “They quarrelled. Well, but this is a surprise! You dog, you! But the secrecy of the whole thing! How snug you kept it! But, I say, you ought to have written to us all.”“Well, certainly, I might have written to you, doctor, but I confess I forgot.”“I say, though, you should have written to the old man.”“We did, letter after letter.”“Then that old—there, I won’t say what, must have suppressed them. She was mad because her favourite lost. It would have been murder to have tied her up to that wreck. I say, though, my boy,” continued the doctor seriously, “I don’t think you ought to have carried on so with Frank Morrison. He has had D.T. terribly.”“What had that to do with me?” said Huish. “If a man will drink, he must take the consequences.”“Exactly,” said the doctor coldly; “but his friends need not egg him on so as to win his money.”“He should not choose scoundrels for his companions,” said Huish coldly.“H’m, no, of course not,” said the doctor, coughing, and hurrying to change the conversation. “By the way, why didn’t you tell me all this when you came last?”“How could I?” said Huish, smiling. “I was not a prophet.”“Prophet, no! but why keep it secret then?”“Secret? Well,” said Huish; “but really—I was not justified in telling it then.”“What I not when you had been married?”“I don’t understand you,” said Huish, with his countenance changing.“I mean,” said the doctor, “why didn’t you tell me when you were here a fortnight ago; and—let me see,” he continued, referring to his note-book, “you were due here last Wednesday, and again yesterday.”John Huish drew a long breath, and the pupils of his eyes contracted as he said quietly:“Why, doctor, I told you that I had been on the Continent, and only returned two days ago.”“Yes; of course. We know—fashionable fibs: Out of town; not at home, etcetera, etcetera.”“My dear doctor,” said Huish, fidgeting slightly in his seat, “I have always made it a practice to try and be honest in my statements. I tell you I only came back two days ago.”“That be hanged, John Huish!” cried the doctor. “Why, you were here a fortnight ago yesterday.”“Nonsense,” cried Huish excitedly. “How absurd!”“Absurd? Hang it, boy! do you think I’m mad? Here is the entry,” he continued, reading. “Seventh, John Huish, Nervous fit—over-excitement—old bite of dog—bad dreams—dread of hydrophobia. Prescribed, um—um—um—etcetera, etcetera. Now then, what do you say to that?”“You were dreaming,” said Huish.“Dreaming?” said the doctor, laughing. “What! that you—here, stop a moment.” He rang the bell. “Ask Daniel yourself when you were here last.”“What nonsense!” said Huish, growing agitated. Then as the door opened, “Daniel,” he said quietly, “when was I here last?”“Yesterday fortnight, sir,” said the man promptly.“That will do, Daniel!” and the attendant retired as Huish sank back in his chair, gazing straight before him in a strange, vacant manner. “What a fool I am!” muttered the doctor. “I’ve led him on to it again. Hang it! shall I never understand my profession?”“I’ll go now,” said Huish drearily, as he rose; but Dr Stonor pressed him back in his seat.“No, no; sit still a few minutes,” he said quietly.“I—I thought it was gone,” said Huish; “and life seemed so bright and happy on ahead. Doctor, I’ve never confessed, even to you, what I have suffered from all this. I have felt horrible at times. The devil has tempted me to do the most dreadful things.”“Poor devil!” said the doctor. “What a broad back he must have to bear all that the silly world lays upon it!”“You laugh. Tell me, what does it mean? How is it? Do I do things in my sleep, or when I am waking, and then do they pass completely away from my memory? Tell me truly, and let me know the worst. Am I going to lose my reason?”“No, no, no!” cried the doctor. “Absurd! It is a want of tone in the nerves—a little absence of mind. The liver is sluggish, and from its stoppage the brain gets affected.”“Yes; that is what I feared,” cried Huish excitedly.“Not as you mean, my dear boy,” cried the doctor. “When we say the brain is affected, we don’t always mean madness. What nonsense! The brain is affected when there are bad headaches—a little congestion, you know. These fits of absence are nothing more.”“Nothing more, doctor?” said Huish dejectedly. “If I could only think so! Oh, my darling! my darling,” he whispered to himself, as his head came down upon his hands for a moment when he started up, for Dr Stonor’s hand was upon his arm. “Oh, doctor!” he cried in anguished tones, “I am haunted by these acts which I do and forget. I am constantly confronted with something or another that I cannot comprehend, and the dread is always growing on me that I shall some day be a wreck. Oh, I have been mad to link that poor girl’s life to such a life as mine! Doctor—doctor—tell me—what shall I do?”“Be a man,” said the doctor quietly, “and don’t worry yourself by imagining more than is real. You are a deal better than when I saw you last. You have not worried yourself more about the bite?”“No, I have hardly thought of it. Dog-bite? But tell me, doctor, would the virus from a dog-bite have any effect upon a man’s mental organisation?”“Oh no, my dear boy; but you are better in health.”“I felt so well and happy to-day,” he cried, “that all seemed sunshine. Now all is cloud.”“Of course; yes!” said the doctor. “That shows you how much the imagination has to do with the mental state. The greater part of my patients are ill from anxiety. Now, look here, my dear John, the first thing you have to bear in mind is that every man is a screw. There may be much or little wrong, and it may vary from a tiny discoloration from rust, up to a completely worn-out worm or a broken head. Your little ailment is distressing; but so is every disorder. Keep yourself in good health, take matters coolly, and in place of getting worse you may get better, perhaps lose the absence of mind altogether. If you do not—bear it like a man. Why trouble about the inevitable? I am getting on in years now, and, my dear fellow, I know that some time or other I shall be lying upon my deathbed gasping for the last breath I shall have to draw. Now, my dear boy, do I sit down and make my life miserable because some day I have got to die? Does anybody do so except a fool, and those weakly-strung idiots who make death horrible when it is nothing but the calm rest and sleep that comes to the worn-out body? No; we accept the inevitable, enjoy life as it is given us, make the best of our troubles and pains, and thank God for everything. Do you hear me?”“Yes, doctor, yes,” said the young man sadly. “But this is very dreadful!”“So is a bad leg,” said the doctor sharply. “There, I’ll speak frankly to you if you’ll sit up and look me full in the face. Come, for your young wife’s sake, shake off this weak nervousness, and be ready to fight. Don’t lie down and ask disease to conquer you. Why, my dear boy, speaking as an old fisherman, you’re as sound as a roach, and as bright as a bleak. Be a man, for your wife’s sake, be a man!”Huish drew a long breath. The doctor had touched the right chord, and he sat up, looking pale but more himself.“Now then,” said the doctor, “I speak to you fairly as one who has had some experience of such matters, but who honestly owns that he finds life too short to master a thousandth part of what he ought to know. I say, then, look here,” he continued, thrusting his hands through his crisp hair, “your state puzzles me: pulse, countenance, eye, all say to me that you are quite well; but you every now and then contradict it. What I tell you, then, is this, and of it I feel sure. It lies in your power to follow either of two roads you please: You can be a healthy, vigorous man, clear of intellect, save a cloud or two now and then which you must treat as rainy days, or you can force yourself by your despondency into so low a mental state that you may become one of my patients. Now, then, which is it to be, my sturdy young married man? Answer for Gertrude’s sake.”“There is only one answer,” cried Huish, springing up. “For Gertrude’s sake.”“That’s right,” cried the doctor, shaking his hand warmly. “Spoken like a man.”“But will you prescribe? Shall I take anything?”“Bah! Stuff! Doctor’s stuff,” he added, laughing. “My dear boy, that dearly beloved, credulous creature, the human being, is never happy unless he is taking bottles and bottles of physic, and boxes and boxes of pills. Look at the fortunes made by it. Human nature will not believe that it can be cured without medicine, when in most cases it can. Why, my dear boy, your daily food is your medicine, your mental and bodily food. There, be off, go and enjoy the society of your dear little wife. Go and row her up the river, or drive her in the park; go in the country and pick buttercups, and run after butterflies, and eat bread-and-butter; sleep well, live well and innocently, and believe in the truest words ever written: ‘Care killed the cat!’ Don’t let it kill you.”“No, I can’t afford to let it kill me,” said Huish, smiling.“Never mind your sore finger, my boy; everybody has got a sore place, only they are divided into two classes: those who show them, and those who do not so much as wear a stall. Good-bye; God bless you, my boy! I wish I had your youth and strength, and pretty wife, and then—”“Then what, doctor?” said Huish, smiling, and looking quite himself.“Why, like you, you dog, I should not be satisfied. Be off; I shall come and see you soon. Where’s your address? Love to my little Gertrude; and John, tell her if—eh?—by-and-by—”“Nonsense!” cried Huish, flushing with pleasure. “I shall tell her no such thing.”“You will,” said the doctor, grinning. “Oh, that’s the address, eh? Westbourne Road. Good-bye.”“I don’t understand him,” said the doctor thoughtfully, as soon as he was alone. “He is himself to-day; last time he was almost brutal. Heaven help him, poor fellow! if—No, no; I will not think that. But he is terribly unhinged at times.”
Dick Millet received a note in his uncle’s crabbed hand one morning at Hampton Court, obtained leave, and hurried up to town, calling at Grosvenor Square to hear the last news about Gertrude, but finding none.
On arriving at Wimpole Street, Vidler opened the door to the visitor, and smiled as he did so in rather a peculiar way.
“Can I speak to my uncle?” said Dick importantly. And he was shown up into the drawing-room, which seemed more gloomy now, lit as it was by four wax-candles, which were lost, as it were, in a great mist of old-time air, that had been shut up in that room till it had grown into a faded and yellow atmosphere carefully preserved from the bleaching properties of the sun.
The little opening was to his right, with the white hand visible on the ledge; but Dick hardly saw it, for, as he entered, Gertrude ran to his arms, to fall sobbing on his neck, while John Huish came forward offering his hand.
“Then it was you, John Huish, after all?” Dick exclaimed angrily, as he placed his own hand behind his back.
“Yes, it was I. What else could I do, forbidden as I was to come to the house? Come, my dear Dick, don’t be hard upon me now.”
“But,” exclaimed Dick in a puzzled way, “how was all this managed?”
“Shall we let that rest?” said Huish, smiling. “Neither Gertrude nor I are very proud of our subterfuges. But come, we are brothers now. We can count upon you, can we not, to make friends with her ladyship.”
“I—don’t know,” said Dick quietly, for his mind was busy with the thoughts of the awkward reports he had heard concerning Huish and his position at various clubs, and he asked himself whether he should be the friend and advocate of a man who was declared to be little better than a blackleg.
“Surely I can count upon you,” said Huish, after a pause.
“Suppose we step down into the dining-room,” said Dick stiffly; but he gave his sister an encouraging smile as she caught his hand.
“Dick,” she whispered, “what does this mean?”
“Only a little clearing up between John Huish and me, dear,” he said. “After that, I dare say I shall be able to tell you I’m glad you’re his wife.”
Gertrude smiled, and Huish followed down to the dining-room, which, lit by one candle, looked like a vault. Arrived here, though, Dick turned sharply upon his brother-in-law.
“Now, look here, John Huish,” he said, “I won’t quarrel about the past and this clandestine match, for perhaps, if I had been situated as you were, I should have done the same; but there is something I want cleared up.”
“Let us clear it up at once then,” said Huish, smiling. “What is it?”
“Well, there are some sinister reports about you—you see, I speak plainly.”
“Yes, of course. Go on.”
“Well, they say commonly that you have been playing out of the square at the clubs; that you’ve been expelled from two, and that your conduct has been little better than that of a blackleg. John Huish, as a gentleman and my brother-in-law, how much of this is true? Stop a moment,” he added hastily. “I know, old man, what it is myself to be pinched for money, and how a fellow might be tempted to do anything shady to get some together to keep up appearances. If there has been anything queer it must be forgiven; but you must give me your word as a man that for the future all shall be right.”
“My dear Dick,” cried Huish, “I give you my word that all in the future shall be square, as you term it; and I tell you this, that if any man had spoken such falsehoods about my wife’s brother, I should have knocked him down. There isn’t a word of truth in these reports, though I must confess they have worried me a great deal. Now, will you shake hands?”
“That I will,” cried Dick eagerly; “and I tell you now that I am glad that you have thrown dust in our eyes as you have. I always liked you, Huish, and you were about the only man from whom I never liked to borrow money.”
“Why?” said Huish, smiling.
“Because I was afraid of losing a friend. Come up now, for Gertrude will be in a fidget to know what we have been saying.—Gertrude, my dear,” he said as they re-entered the drawing-room, “it’s all right.”
An hour later Dick parted from the young couple at the little house they had taken in Westbourne Road, and cabbed back, to send her ladyship into a fainting fit by the announcement that his sister and her husband had been at his uncle’s.
“For,” said Lady Millet, “I can never forgive Gertrude; and as to that dreadful man Huish, in marrying him she has disgraced herself beyond the power to redeem her lot. Ah me! and these are the children I have nurtured in my bosom.”
It was rather hard work for Dick Millet, with his own love affairs in a state of “check,” with no probability of “mate,” but he felt that he must act; and in his newly assumed character of head of the family he determined to go and try to smooth matters over at Chesham Place, and took a hansom to see Frank Morrison, who was now back at his own house, but alone, and who surlily pointed to a chair as he sat back pale and nervous of aspect, wrapped in a dressing-gown.
“Look here, Frank,” said Dick, sitting down, and helping himself to a cigar, “we’re brothers-in-law, and I’m not going to quarrel. I’ve come for the other thing.”
“My cigars, seemingly,” said the other.
“Yes; they’re not bad. But look here, old fellow, light up; I want to talk to you.”
“If you want to borrow twenty pounds, say so, and I’ll draw you a cheque.”
“Hang your cheque! I didn’t come to borrow money. Light up.”
Morrison snatched up a cigar, bit off the end, and lit it, threw himself back in his chair, and began to smoke quickly.
“Go on,” he said. “What is it?”
“Wait a minute or two,” said Dick. “Smoke five minutes first.”
Morrison muttered something unpleasant, but went on smoking, and at last Dick, who was sitting with his little legs dangling over the side of the chair, began.
“Fact is,” he said, “I’m going to speak out. I shan’t quarrel, and I’m such a little chap that you can’t hit me.”
“No; but I could throw you downstairs,” said Morrison, who was half amused, half annoyed by his visitor’s coming, though in his heart of hearts he longed to hear news of Renée.
“I saw my uncle yesterday.”
“Indeed! Poor old lunatic! What had he got to say?”
“Ah, there you are wrong!” said Dick sharply. “He said something which you will own proved that he was no lunatic.”
“What was it?” said Morrison coldly.
“That you were a confounded scoundrel.”
Frank Morrison jumped up in his chair, scowling angrily; but he threw himself back again with a contemptuous “Pish!”
“Proves it, don’t it?”
“Look here,” cried Morrison angrily, “I’ve had about enough of your family, so please finish your cigar and go.”
“Shan’t. There, it’s no use to twist about. I’ve come on purpose to sit upon you.”
“Look here,” cried Morrison sternly, “has your sister sent you?”
“No. I’ve come of my own free will, as I tell you, to show you what a fool you are, and to try and bring you to your senses.”
“You are very ready at calling people fools,” said Morrison, biting his nails.
“Well, don’t you deserve to be called one for acting as you have acted? What did you do? Went mad after a woman who didn’t care asoufor you; neglected a dear, good girl who did care for you, and exposed her to the persecutions of a scoundrel who has no more principle than that.”
He snapped his fingers, and, instead of firing up with rage, Morrison turned his face away and smoked furiously.
“Now, isn’t that all true, Frank? Here, give me a light.”
Morrison lit a spill, passed it to his brother-in-law, and sank back in his chair.
“I say,” continued Dick, as he lit his cigar again, “isn’t it (puff) quite (puff) true?”
“I suppose so,” said the other listlessly. “She never cared for me, though, Dick. That scoundrel and she were old flames.”
“First, a lie; second, true,” said Dick quietly. “Renée is as good as gold; and when she found she was to be your wife, she accepted the inevitable and tried to do her duty, poor girl! She was already finding out what a bad one Malpas was.”
“Curse him! don’t mention his name here!” cried Morrison savagely.
“I say she was already finding out what a cursed scoundrel Malpas was when she married you.”
“She encouraged his visits afterwards,” cried Morrison fiercely. “The villain owned it to me.”
“And you didn’t thrust your fist down his throat?”
Morrison got up and paced the room.
“Look here, Frank, old fellow: you are beginning to find out what a donkey you have been. You are easy-going, and it’s no hard job to lead you away. Now tell me this: didn’t Malpas introduce you to a certain lady?”
“Yes,” was the sulky reply.
“Of course,” said Dick. “He takes you and moulds you like putty, introduces you to people so as to make your wife jealous, out of revenge for your supplanting him, and then tries to supplant you in turn.”
“Dick Millet,” cried Morrison, “you mean well, but I can’t bear this. Either be silent or go. If I think of the scene on that dreadful night when I was sent home by a note written by that scoundrel of a brother-in-law of yours—”
“Meaning yourself?” said Dick coolly.
“I mean that double-faced, double-lived, double-dyed traitor, John Huish.”
“What!”
“The man who has fleeced me more than Malpas—curse him!—ever did.”
“Gently! I won’t sit and hear John Huish maligned like that.”
“Maligned!” cried Morrison, with a bitter laugh.
“As if anyone could say anything bad enough of the scoundrel!”
“Look here, Frank,” said Dick rather warmly, “I came here to try and do you a good turn, not to hear John Huish backbitten. He’s a good, true-hearted fellow, who has been slandered up and down, and he don’t deserve it.”
Morrison sat up, stared at him in wonder, and then burst into a scornful laugh.
“Dick Millet,” he exclaimed, “you called me a fool a little while ago. I won’t call you so, only ask you whether you don’t think you are one.”
“I dare say I am,” said Dick sharply. “But look here, are you prepared to prove all this about John Huish?”
“Every bit of it, and ten times as much,” said Morrison. “Why, this scoundrel won or cheated me of the money that paid for his wedding trip. He was with me till the last instant. Yes, and, as well as I can recollect, after he had got your sister away.”
Dick’s cigar went out, and his forehead began to pucker up.
“Look here,” he said: “you told me that he sent you the note that made you go home that night. Where were you?”
“At a supper with some actresses.”
“But John Huish was not there!”
“Not there. Why, he was present with the lady who was his companion up to the time that he honoured your sister with his name. I believe he visits her now.”
“I can’t stand this,” cried Dick, throwing away his cigar. “How a fellow who calls himself a man can play double in this way gets over me. Frank Morrison, if I did as much I should feel as if I had ‘liar’ written on my face, ready for my wife to see. It’s too much to believe about John Huish. I can’t—I won’t have it. Why, it would break poor little Gerty’s heart.”
“Break her heart!” said Morrison bitterly. “Perhaps she would take a leaf out of her sister’s book.”
“Confound you, Frank Morrison!” cried Dick, in a rage, as he jumped up and faced his brother-in-law. “I won’t stand it. My two sisters are as pure as angels. Do you dare to tell me to my face that you believe Renée guilty?”
There was a dead silence in the room, and at last Frank Morrison spoke.
“Dick,” he said, and his voice shook, “you are a good fellow. You are right: I am a fool and a scoundrel.”
“Yes,” cried Dick; “but do you dare to tell me you believe that of Renée?”
“I’d give half my life to know that she was innocent,” groaned Morrison.
“You are a fool, then,” cried Dick, “or you’d know it. There, I didn’t come to quarrel, but to try and make you both happy; and now matters are ten times worse. But I won’t believe this about John.”
“It’s true enough,” said Morrison sadly. “Poor little lass! I liked Gertrude. You should not have let that scoundrel have her.”
“We have a weakness for letting our family marry scoundrels.”
“Yes,” said Morrison, speaking without the slightest resentment; “she had better have had poor Lord Henry Moorpark.”
“Oh!” said Dick. “There, I’m going. ’Day.”
He moved towards the door, but Morrison stopped him.
“Dick,” he said; “did Renée know you were coming?”
“No,” was the curt reply.
“Is she—is she still at your uncle’s?”
“Yes, nearly always.”
“Is she—is she well?”
“No. She is ill. Heartsick and broken; and if what you say is true, she will soon have poor Gerty to keep her company.”
Dick Millet hurried away from his brother-in-law’s house, pondering upon his own love matters, and telling himself that he had more to think of than he could bear.
In happy ignorance of her ladyship’s prostrate state, John Huish, soon after his brother-in-law’s departure, hurried off to pay a hasty visit to his club, where he asked to see the secretary, and was informed that that gentleman was out. He threw himself into a cab, looking rather white and set of countenance as he had himself driven to Finsbury Square, where Daniel looked at him curiously as he ushered him into the doctor’s room.
“My dear, dear boy, I am glad!” cried the doctor, dashing down his glasses. “You did the old lady, after all, and carried the little darling off. Bless her heart! Why, the gipsy! Oh, won’t I talk to her about this. That’s the best thing I’ve known for years. What does your father say?”
“He wrote me word that he was very glad, and said he should write to Gertrude’s uncle.”
“Ah, yes. H’m!” said the doctor. “Best thing, too. They were once very great friends, John.”
“Yes, I have heard so,” said Huish. “I think Captain Millet loved my mother.”
“H’m, yes,” said the doctor, nodding. “They quarrelled. Well, but this is a surprise! You dog, you! But the secrecy of the whole thing! How snug you kept it! But, I say, you ought to have written to us all.”
“Well, certainly, I might have written to you, doctor, but I confess I forgot.”
“I say, though, you should have written to the old man.”
“We did, letter after letter.”
“Then that old—there, I won’t say what, must have suppressed them. She was mad because her favourite lost. It would have been murder to have tied her up to that wreck. I say, though, my boy,” continued the doctor seriously, “I don’t think you ought to have carried on so with Frank Morrison. He has had D.T. terribly.”
“What had that to do with me?” said Huish. “If a man will drink, he must take the consequences.”
“Exactly,” said the doctor coldly; “but his friends need not egg him on so as to win his money.”
“He should not choose scoundrels for his companions,” said Huish coldly.
“H’m, no, of course not,” said the doctor, coughing, and hurrying to change the conversation. “By the way, why didn’t you tell me all this when you came last?”
“How could I?” said Huish, smiling. “I was not a prophet.”
“Prophet, no! but why keep it secret then?”
“Secret? Well,” said Huish; “but really—I was not justified in telling it then.”
“What I not when you had been married?”
“I don’t understand you,” said Huish, with his countenance changing.
“I mean,” said the doctor, “why didn’t you tell me when you were here a fortnight ago; and—let me see,” he continued, referring to his note-book, “you were due here last Wednesday, and again yesterday.”
John Huish drew a long breath, and the pupils of his eyes contracted as he said quietly:
“Why, doctor, I told you that I had been on the Continent, and only returned two days ago.”
“Yes; of course. We know—fashionable fibs: Out of town; not at home, etcetera, etcetera.”
“My dear doctor,” said Huish, fidgeting slightly in his seat, “I have always made it a practice to try and be honest in my statements. I tell you I only came back two days ago.”
“That be hanged, John Huish!” cried the doctor. “Why, you were here a fortnight ago yesterday.”
“Nonsense,” cried Huish excitedly. “How absurd!”
“Absurd? Hang it, boy! do you think I’m mad? Here is the entry,” he continued, reading. “Seventh, John Huish, Nervous fit—over-excitement—old bite of dog—bad dreams—dread of hydrophobia. Prescribed, um—um—um—etcetera, etcetera. Now then, what do you say to that?”
“You were dreaming,” said Huish.
“Dreaming?” said the doctor, laughing. “What! that you—here, stop a moment.” He rang the bell. “Ask Daniel yourself when you were here last.”
“What nonsense!” said Huish, growing agitated. Then as the door opened, “Daniel,” he said quietly, “when was I here last?”
“Yesterday fortnight, sir,” said the man promptly.
“That will do, Daniel!” and the attendant retired as Huish sank back in his chair, gazing straight before him in a strange, vacant manner. “What a fool I am!” muttered the doctor. “I’ve led him on to it again. Hang it! shall I never understand my profession?”
“I’ll go now,” said Huish drearily, as he rose; but Dr Stonor pressed him back in his seat.
“No, no; sit still a few minutes,” he said quietly.
“I—I thought it was gone,” said Huish; “and life seemed so bright and happy on ahead. Doctor, I’ve never confessed, even to you, what I have suffered from all this. I have felt horrible at times. The devil has tempted me to do the most dreadful things.”
“Poor devil!” said the doctor. “What a broad back he must have to bear all that the silly world lays upon it!”
“You laugh. Tell me, what does it mean? How is it? Do I do things in my sleep, or when I am waking, and then do they pass completely away from my memory? Tell me truly, and let me know the worst. Am I going to lose my reason?”
“No, no, no!” cried the doctor. “Absurd! It is a want of tone in the nerves—a little absence of mind. The liver is sluggish, and from its stoppage the brain gets affected.”
“Yes; that is what I feared,” cried Huish excitedly.
“Not as you mean, my dear boy,” cried the doctor. “When we say the brain is affected, we don’t always mean madness. What nonsense! The brain is affected when there are bad headaches—a little congestion, you know. These fits of absence are nothing more.”
“Nothing more, doctor?” said Huish dejectedly. “If I could only think so! Oh, my darling! my darling,” he whispered to himself, as his head came down upon his hands for a moment when he started up, for Dr Stonor’s hand was upon his arm. “Oh, doctor!” he cried in anguished tones, “I am haunted by these acts which I do and forget. I am constantly confronted with something or another that I cannot comprehend, and the dread is always growing on me that I shall some day be a wreck. Oh, I have been mad to link that poor girl’s life to such a life as mine! Doctor—doctor—tell me—what shall I do?”
“Be a man,” said the doctor quietly, “and don’t worry yourself by imagining more than is real. You are a deal better than when I saw you last. You have not worried yourself more about the bite?”
“No, I have hardly thought of it. Dog-bite? But tell me, doctor, would the virus from a dog-bite have any effect upon a man’s mental organisation?”
“Oh no, my dear boy; but you are better in health.”
“I felt so well and happy to-day,” he cried, “that all seemed sunshine. Now all is cloud.”
“Of course; yes!” said the doctor. “That shows you how much the imagination has to do with the mental state. The greater part of my patients are ill from anxiety. Now, look here, my dear John, the first thing you have to bear in mind is that every man is a screw. There may be much or little wrong, and it may vary from a tiny discoloration from rust, up to a completely worn-out worm or a broken head. Your little ailment is distressing; but so is every disorder. Keep yourself in good health, take matters coolly, and in place of getting worse you may get better, perhaps lose the absence of mind altogether. If you do not—bear it like a man. Why trouble about the inevitable? I am getting on in years now, and, my dear fellow, I know that some time or other I shall be lying upon my deathbed gasping for the last breath I shall have to draw. Now, my dear boy, do I sit down and make my life miserable because some day I have got to die? Does anybody do so except a fool, and those weakly-strung idiots who make death horrible when it is nothing but the calm rest and sleep that comes to the worn-out body? No; we accept the inevitable, enjoy life as it is given us, make the best of our troubles and pains, and thank God for everything. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, doctor, yes,” said the young man sadly. “But this is very dreadful!”
“So is a bad leg,” said the doctor sharply. “There, I’ll speak frankly to you if you’ll sit up and look me full in the face. Come, for your young wife’s sake, shake off this weak nervousness, and be ready to fight. Don’t lie down and ask disease to conquer you. Why, my dear boy, speaking as an old fisherman, you’re as sound as a roach, and as bright as a bleak. Be a man, for your wife’s sake, be a man!”
Huish drew a long breath. The doctor had touched the right chord, and he sat up, looking pale but more himself.
“Now then,” said the doctor, “I speak to you fairly as one who has had some experience of such matters, but who honestly owns that he finds life too short to master a thousandth part of what he ought to know. I say, then, look here,” he continued, thrusting his hands through his crisp hair, “your state puzzles me: pulse, countenance, eye, all say to me that you are quite well; but you every now and then contradict it. What I tell you, then, is this, and of it I feel sure. It lies in your power to follow either of two roads you please: You can be a healthy, vigorous man, clear of intellect, save a cloud or two now and then which you must treat as rainy days, or you can force yourself by your despondency into so low a mental state that you may become one of my patients. Now, then, which is it to be, my sturdy young married man? Answer for Gertrude’s sake.”
“There is only one answer,” cried Huish, springing up. “For Gertrude’s sake.”
“That’s right,” cried the doctor, shaking his hand warmly. “Spoken like a man.”
“But will you prescribe? Shall I take anything?”
“Bah! Stuff! Doctor’s stuff,” he added, laughing. “My dear boy, that dearly beloved, credulous creature, the human being, is never happy unless he is taking bottles and bottles of physic, and boxes and boxes of pills. Look at the fortunes made by it. Human nature will not believe that it can be cured without medicine, when in most cases it can. Why, my dear boy, your daily food is your medicine, your mental and bodily food. There, be off, go and enjoy the society of your dear little wife. Go and row her up the river, or drive her in the park; go in the country and pick buttercups, and run after butterflies, and eat bread-and-butter; sleep well, live well and innocently, and believe in the truest words ever written: ‘Care killed the cat!’ Don’t let it kill you.”
“No, I can’t afford to let it kill me,” said Huish, smiling.
“Never mind your sore finger, my boy; everybody has got a sore place, only they are divided into two classes: those who show them, and those who do not so much as wear a stall. Good-bye; God bless you, my boy! I wish I had your youth and strength, and pretty wife, and then—”
“Then what, doctor?” said Huish, smiling, and looking quite himself.
“Why, like you, you dog, I should not be satisfied. Be off; I shall come and see you soon. Where’s your address? Love to my little Gertrude; and John, tell her if—eh?—by-and-by—”
“Nonsense!” cried Huish, flushing with pleasure. “I shall tell her no such thing.”
“You will,” said the doctor, grinning. “Oh, that’s the address, eh? Westbourne Road. Good-bye.”
“I don’t understand him,” said the doctor thoughtfully, as soon as he was alone. “He is himself to-day; last time he was almost brutal. Heaven help him, poor fellow! if—No, no; I will not think that. But he is terribly unhinged at times.”
Volume Two—Chapter Thirteen.Clotilde is Triumphant.Palace Gardens, Kensington, was selected by Elbraham for the scene of his married life, and here he was to take the fair Clotilde upon their return from their Continental trip.“It’s all bosh, Litton, that going across to Paris; and on one’s wedding day,” said the great financier. “Can’t we get off it?”“Impossible, I should say,” replied Litton. “You see, you are bound to make yours the most stylish of the fashionable marriages of the season.”“Oh yes, of course—that I don’t mind; and I’ll come out as handsome as you like for the things to do it with well; but I do kick against the run over to Paris the same day.”“And why?” said Litton wonderingly.“Well, the fact is, my boy, I never could go across the Channel without being terribly ill. Ill! that’s nothing to my feelings. I’m a regular martyr, and I feel disposed to strike against all that. Why not say the Lakes?”“Too shabby and cockneyfied.”“Wales?”“Worse still.”“Why not Scotland?”“My dear sir, what man with a position to keep up would think of going there? I’ll consult Lady Littletown, if you like.”“Lord, no; don’t do that,” said Elbraham. “She’s certain to say I must go to Paris; and so sure as ever I do have to cross, the Channel is at its worst.”“But it is a very short passage, sir. You’ll soon be over; and in society a man of your position is forced to study appearances.”“How the deuce can a fellow study appearances at a time like that?” growled Elbraham. “I always feel as if it would be a mercy to throw me overboard. ’Pon my soul I do.”“I’ll see if I cannot fee the clerk of the weather for you, and get you a smooth passage this time,” said Litton, laughing; and the matter dropped.There were endless other little matters to settle, in all of which Litton was the bridegroom’s ambassador, carrying presents, bringing back messages and notes, and in one way and another thoroughly ingratiating himself in Clotilde’s favour, that young lady condescending to smile upon him when he visited Hampton Court.The Palace Gardens house was rapidly prepared, and, thanks to Arthur Litton, who had been consulted on both sides, and finally entrusted with the arrangements, everything was in so refined a style that there was but little room for envy to carp and condemn.Certainly, Lady Littletown had had what Mr Elbraham called a finger in the pie, and had added no little by her advice and counsel in making the interior the model it was.“For,” said Elbraham, in a little quiet dinner with her ladyship at Hampton, “I’m not particular to a few thousands. All I say is, let me have something to look at for my money; and I say, Litton, draw it mild, you know.”“I don’t understand you,” said that gentleman. “Do you mean don’t have the decorations too showy?”“Not I. Have ’em as showy as you like. Get out with you; how innocent we are!”“Really, Mr Elbraham, I do not know what you mean,” said Litton stiffly.“Go along with you,” chuckled Elbraham. “I say, draw it mild. Of course you’ll make your bit of commission with the furniture people; but draw it mild.”Litton flushed with annoyance and indignation, probably on account of his having received a promise of a cheque for two hundred pounds from a firm if he placed the decorating and furnishing of Mr Elbraham’s new mansion in their hands.A look from Lady Littletown quieted him, and that lady laughed most heartily.“Oh, you funny man, Elbraham! really you are, you know, a very funny man.”“Oh, I don’t know,” chuckled the financier; “I like my joke. But look here, Litton, I don’t get married every day, and want to do it well. I’m not going to put on the screw, I can tell you. You furnish the place spiff, and bring me the bills afterwards, and I’ll give you cheques for the amounts. If there is a bit of discount, have it and welcome; I shan’t complain so long as the thing is done well.”So Arthur Litton contented himself with calling the financier “a coarse beast,” declined to be more fully offended, and aided by Lady Littletown, who worked hard for nothing but thekudos, furnished the house in admirable style, received the cheques from Elbraham, who really did pay without grumbling, and soothed his injured feelings with the very substantial commission which he received.Upon one part of the decorations Lady Littletown prided herself immensely, and that was upon the addition to the drawing-room of a very spacious conservatory built upon the model of her own; and this she laboured hard to fill with choice foliage plants and gaily petalled exotics of her own selection.Her carriage was seen daily at the principal florists’, and Elbraham had to write a very handsome cheque for what he called the “greenstuff”; but it was without a murmur, and he smiled with satisfaction as Lady Littletown triumphantly led him in to see the result of her toil.“Yes,” he said, “tip-top—beats the C.P. hollow! Puts one a little in mind of what the Pantheon used to be when I was a boy.”“But, my dear Elbraham, is thatallyou have to say?” exclaimed her ladyship.“Well, since you put it like that, Lady Littletown, I won’t shilly-shally.”“No, don’t—pray don’t. I like to hear you speak out, Elbraham—you are so original.”“Oh, I am, am I?” he said. “Well, you know—well, I was going to say, don’t you think some of those statues are a little too prononsay, as you people call it, you know?”“Naughty man!” exclaimed her ladyship. “I will not have fault found with a thing, especially as I brought our sweet Clotilde here, and she was perfectly charmed with all she saw. The flowers are really, really—”“Well, they are not amiss,” said the financier; and he went up to a wreath of stephanotis with such evident intention of picking a “buttonhole” that Lady Littletown hooked him with the handle of her sunshade, uttering a scream of horror the while.“Mustn’t touch—naughty boy!” she cried. “How could you?”“Oh, all right,” said Elbraham, grinning hugely at the idea of not being allowed to touch his own property; and then he suffered himself to be led through the various rooms, one and all replete with the most refined luxuries of life.“Now, you do think it is nice, my dear Elbraham?” said her ladyship.“Nice? It’s clipping! Might have had a little more voluptuousness; but Litton says no, so I don’t complain. I say: Clotilde—you know, eh?”“Yes, dear Elbraham. What of her?”“She ought to be satisfied, eh?”“She is charmed; she really loves the place. Come, I’ll tell you a secret. The darling—ah, but you’ll betray me?”“No—honour bright!” cried Elbraham, laying his hand upon the side of his waistcoat.“Well, I’ll tell you, then; but, mind, it is sacred.”“Of course—of course.”“The darling begged me to bring her up to see the delicious nest being prepared for her; but it was to be a stolen visit, for she said she could never look you in the face again if she thought you knew.”“Dear girl!” ejaculated Elbraham. “Yes, she is so sweet and unworldly and innocent! Do you know, my dear Elbraham,” said Lady Littletown, “a man like you, for whom so many mothers were bidding—”“Ah, yes, I used to get a few invitations,” said Elbraham complacently.“I used to hear how terribly you flirted at Lady Millet’s with those two daughters,” said Lady Littletown playfully.“By George! no. However, the old woman was always asking me to her at-homes and dinners, and to that wedding; but I never went.”“I knew it,” said Lady Littletown to herself. “How mad she must be! Ah me!” she continued mournfully, “there are times when I feel as if I have done wrong in furthering this match.”“The deuce you do! Why?” ejaculated Elbraham. “Because my sweet Clotilde is so unused to the ways of the world, and it is such a terrible stride from her present home to the head of such an establishment as this.”“Oh, that be hanged!” cried Elbraham. “’Tis a change, of course—a precious great change from those skimpily-furnished apartments at Hampton Court.”“But show is not everything, my dear Elbraham,” said Lady Littletown, laying a finger impressively upon the financier’s arm.“No, it is not; but people like it. I’ll be bound to say Clotilde likes this place.”“She was in raptures—she could hardly contain her delight. Her sweet innocent ways of showing her pleasure made my heart bound. Ah, Elbraham, you have won a prize!”“So has she,” he said gruffly. “I don’t know but what she has got the best of the bargain.”“Oh, you conceited man! how dare you say so? But it is only your quaintness.”“I say, though,” cried Elbraham, “she did like the place?”“I cannot tell you how much she was delighted.”“Did she say anything about me?”“Oh yes; she was prattling artlessly about you for long enough—about your kindness, your generosity, the richness of the jewels you had given her. You sadly extravagant man! I can’t tell you half what she said; but I really must take you to task for spoiling her so.”Elbraham coughed and cleared his throat.“Didn’t—er—er—she didn’t say anything about—about my dress—my personal appearance, did she?”“Now, wasn’t I right when I called you a conceited man? Really, Elbraham, it is shocking! I declare you are one of the most anxious lovers I ever met, and I won’t tell you a word she said.”“Oh yes; come now, do.”“It would be a breach of confidence, and I really cannot give way—no, not on any consideration.”“You are hard upon me,” said Elbraham. “Oh, by the way, I haven’t forgotten you, Lady Littletown. Would you wear this to oblige me?”“Oh no, I could not think of taking it, Mr Elbraham really. It looks so like a bribe, too.”“No, no, that it don’t,” said the financier. “I wouldn’t give it to you at first, for fear your ladyship should think I meant it in that way; but now it is all settled, and you have been so kind to me, I thought perhaps you would not mind accepting that little marquise ring just as a remembrance of, etcetera, etcetera—you know.”“Well, if you put it like that,” said Lady Littletown, “I suppose I must take it, and wear it as you say. But it is too good, Elbraham—it is, really. What a lovely opal!”“Yes, ’tis a good one, isn’t it?”“Charming! And what regular diamonds!”“I thought you’d like it,” chuckled Elbraham; and then, to himself, “They’re all alike.”“Do you know, Elbraham,” said her ladyship, holding the ring up to the light for him to see, as she fitted it upon her finger over her glove—“lovely, isn’t it?—do you know, Elbraham, that I was going to ask you to do me a kindness?”“Were you, though? What is it?”“Well, you see, Elbraham, living, as I do, a woman’s life, I am so ignorant of business matters.”“Of course you are,” he responded. “Want to make your will?”“No, no, no, no! horrid man! How can you?” she cried, whipping him playfully with her sunshade. “I want you to tell me what it means when a gentleman is short of money and he goes to somebody to get a bill discounted.”“Simplest thing in the world. If the paper’s good,” said Elbraham, “discount accordingly. I never touch bills now.”“No?” she said sweetly; “but then you are so rich. But that is it, Elbraham—if the paper’s good, discount accordingly? What do you call it—the bill? Well, it is easy to have it on the very best note-paper.”“Haw, haw, haw! bless your ladyship’s innocence!” cried Elbraham, with a hoarse laugh. “By paper being good I mean that the man who signs his name is substantial—can pay up when it comes to maturity.”“Oh!” said Lady Littletown, drawing out the interjection in a singularly long way, “I see now. And that is how a gentleman raises money, is it?”“Yes, that’s it,” said Elbraham, eyeing her ladyship curiously.“Would not a lady do?” asked Lady Littletown.“To be sure she would!” said the financier. “Lookye here—does your ladyship want a hundred or two?”“Not to-morrow, dear Mr Elbraham; but my rents do not come in for another month, and I must confess to having been rather extravagant lately—I have had a great deal of company, and I thought I might—might—might—what do you call it?”“Do a bill.”“Yes, that’s it—do a bill,” said her ladyship, “if some kind friend would show me how.”“It’s done,” said Elbraham. “What would you like—two-fifty?”“Well, yes,” said her ladyship.“Better make it three hundred—looks better,” said the financier.“But you are not to advance the money, dear Mr Elbraham. I could not take it of you.”“All right; I shan’t have anything to do with it. Someone in the City will send your ladyship a slip of paper to sign, and the cheque will come by the next post. I say, though, what did Clotilde say?”“Oh, I daren’t tell you. Really, you know—pray don’t press me—I couldn’t confess. Dear Clotilde would be so angry if I betrayed her—dear girl! I could not do that, you know.”“Honour bright, I wouldn’t say a word for the world.”“Well, it’s very shocking, you know, Elbraham, and I was quite astonished to hear her say it; but she is so innocent and girlish, and it came out so naturally that I forgave her.”“But what did she say?”“Oh, dear child,” she clapped her hands together with delight, and then covered her blushing face and cried, “Oh, Lady Littletown, I wish it was to-morrow!”“By Jingo!” exclaimed the financier to himself, “so do I!”Everybody being in the same mind, the wedding was hurried on. The trousseau was of the most splendid character, and Marie entered into the spirit of the affair with such eagerness that the sisters forbore to quarrel.Mr Montaigne came and went far more frequently, and seemed to bless his pupils in an almost apostolic fashion.“I would give much,” he said, with a gentle, pious look of longing, “to be able to perform the ceremony which joins two loving hearts.”But three eminent divines were to tie that knot, and even if Mr Paul Montaigne had been in holy orders according to the rites and ceremonies of the English Church, his services would not have been demanded, and he contented himself with smiling benignly and offering a few kindly words of advice.Miss Dymcox and the Honourable Isabella were rather at odds on the question of intimacy, and Captain Glen would have been religiously excluded from the precincts of Hampton Court Palace private apartments if the Honourable Philippa had had her way; but Lady Littletown took it as a matter of course that several of the officers of the barracks should be invited, to addéclatto the proceedings, and as the Honourable Isabella sided with her, invitation-cards were sent, and, for reasons that Glen could not have explained to himself, were accepted.“Yes, I’ll go, if it’s only to show her that I am not cast down. I’ll go and see her married. I’ll see her sell herself into slavery, and I hope she may never repent her step.”The next hour, though, he said he would not go, and he was about to keep to his determination, when Dick came in, and announced that he had received an invitation.“You’ll go, of course?”“Go? No; why should I?”“Just to show that you are a man of the world; no woman should fool me and make me seem like the chap in the song—‘wasting in despair—die, because a woman’s fair’—you know. Oh, I’d go.”Glen sat thinking for awhile.“I wouldn’t be cut up, you know.”“If I thought that she threw me over of her own free will, Dick, I would not care a sou; but I believe that wicked old hag, her aunt Philippa, has forced her into it.”“Then you need not care a sou.”“How do you know?”“Marie told me she accepted Elbraham for his coin.”“Yes; she intimated as much to me.”“She did! When?”“Oh, the other day—the last time I saw her—when I had been to the private apartments, you know.”“Oh yes. Ah, to be sure,” said Dick, who seemed much relieved. “Oh, I’d go, dear boy; I would indeed.”“I will go,” said Glen with energy; and on the appointed day he went.Hampton Court had not seen a more brilliant wedding for years, and the preparations at the Honourable Misses Dymcox’s apartments so completely put Joseph off his head that he, the reputable young man who preached temperance to Buddy the flyman, and was carefully saving up all his money to add to the savings of Markes for the purpose of taking a lodging-house, was compelled to fly to stimulants to sustain him.The very way in which the dining-room was “done up,” as he called it, “with flowers and things” staggered him, and it seemed no wonder that the greeny stone basin in the middle court should sound quite noisy as the big squirt in the centre made more ambitious efforts than usual to mount the sky, and the old gold and silver fish stared more wonderingly as they sailed round and round.But Joseph was not alone in being off his head and flying to stimulants; even cook was as bad, and was found by Markes standing at the door and talking to a soldier—the greatest treason in Markes’ eyes that a woman could commit—and reprimanded thereon, with the consequence that cook rebounded like a spring, and struck the austere, temperate, unloving Markes.It was no wonder, for the sacred department of cook had been invaded by strange men in white apparel to such an extent that from being angry she grew hysterical, and went to Markes, apologetic and meek, for comfort, vowing that she couldn’t “abear” soldiers; but she was so humbled by the austere damsel that she turned to Joseph, who administered to her from the same cup as that wherefrom he obtained his relief.The wearers of the white caps and jackets brought abatterie de cuisine, bombarded and captured the room set apart for cooking, and then and there proceeded to build up strange edifices of sugar, concoct soups, sweets, and all and sundry of those meats which are used to furnish forth a wedding feast.The cases of wines that came in took away Joseph’s breath, but he revived a little at the sight of the flowers, and shortly afterwards relapsed, staying in a peculiarly misty state of mind and a new suit of livery to the end of the proceedings, during which time he had a faint recollection of seeing the Honourable Philippa greatly excited and the Honourable Isabella very tremulous, as they went about in new dresses, made in the style worn by the late Queen Adelaide, making them both bear some resemblance to a couple of human sprigs of lavender, taken out, carefully preserved, from some old box, where they had been lying for the past half-century.It was a very troublous time, and Joseph wished his head had been a little clearer than it was. Those wide-spreading Queen Adelaide bonnets and feathers seemed to dance before his eyes and to confuse him. So did the constantly arriving company; but, still, he recalled a great deal. For instance, he had a lively recollection of the smell of his “bokay,” as he called it; of the young ladies going to the service at the church and coming back in a carriage, behind which he stood with an enormous white favour and the bouquet in his breast, while some boys shouted “Hurray!” He remembered that, but it did not make him happy, for he could never settle it thoroughly in his own mind whether that “hurray” was meant for him or for the bride.That affair of the bride, too, troubled Joseph a good deal, and, but for the respect in which he held the family, or the awe in which he stood of the Honourable Philippa, he would have resented it strongly.Certainly there were only two horses to the carriage behind which Joseph stood, but it was a particularly good carriage, hired from a London livery stables, with capital horses and a superior driver, who looked quite respectable in the hat and coat kept on purpose for Buddy the fly-driver, although he grumbled at having to put them on, as Buddy had been intoxicated upon the last occasion of his wearing them, and had somewhat taken off their bloom through going back to his stables and wearing them while he lay down in the straw for a nap.Upon that occasion Joseph had seriously lectured Buddy upon the evils of intemperance.“Look at me,” he said; “I can drink a glass of ale without its hurting me.”“Well, the things ain’t improved, suttenly,” said Buddy in a repentant tone. Then scornfully: “But as to you and your slooshun of biled brewer’s aperns that you calls ale, why, you might wet-nuss babies on it, and it wouldn’t hurt ’em so long as you didn’t do it when it’s sour.”“But it’s a very, very bad habit, Buddy,” exclaimed Markes; “just look at that hat.”“Ah, you’ll have worse jobs than that some of these days when you marries a sojer.”Mrs Markes bounced out in disgust.“How she do hate to hear the soldiers mentioned, surely,” chuckled Buddy. “Why, she can’t abear ’em. But she needn’t be so hard about a fellow getting a drop; it’s a great comfort. She don’t know what it is, and never got to that stage, Joe, when everything about you as you taste and touch and smell feels as if it was soft and nice, and as if you’d tumbled into a place as was nothing else but welwet.”The result was that Buddy’s hat and coat were thoroughly taken in hand by Markes and furbished up, the overcoat having to be rubbed and turpentined and brushed till it was more in keeping with the style of a wedding garment, while the hat was ‘gone over’ with a sponge and flat-iron, to the production of a most unearthly gloss, anent which Buddy chaffed the new driver. But of course that was on account of jealousy, that he, the regular ladies’ coachman, and his musty-smelling, jangling fly and meagrimed horse should be set aside upon an occasion when there would have been “a bite to get and a sup o’ suthin’ just to wash out a fellow’s mouth,” For Buddy had a laudable desire to keep his mouth clean by washing it out; and he resented the insult to his dignity upon this occasion by going to the Mitre Tap, and washing out his mouth till he was unable to take this clean mouth home.As the Dymcoxes sported so dashing a turn-out, and Joseph handed in the bride and took her to church, what he wanted to know was why Elbraham should take her back in his four-horse chariot. Of course he would take her away in it afterwards; but according to Joseph’s idea it would have been far more respectful to the Honourable Dymcoxes if Elbraham had come with his young wife in the hired carriage along with him.This was a trouble to Joseph, which he objected to largely, wearing a soured and ill-used look on the way back from Hampton Church; and he was not a great deal better when, meeting Elbraham on the staircase, that gentleman slipped a five-pound note in his hand.The bride looked very beautiful, and Joseph heard that she wore real lace, and it covered her nearly from top to toe. The white satin dress, too, was wonderfully stiff and good, while her bouquet, sent, with those for the bridesmaids, in so many neat wooden boxes from the central avenue of Covent Garden, was “quite a picter,” so Joseph said.But somehow it was all a muddle, and Joseph could make neither head nor tail of it. He felt as if he must seize and ring the dinner-bell, or carry in the form for prayers. For instance, there was that Lord Henry Moorpark there, and Captain Glen and Mr Richard Millet, who had tipped him over and over again, and ought to have married the ladies. They were there, and so was that tall, dark Major Malpas, who always “looked at him as if he had been a dorg; and lots more people crowding into the rooms, and a-eating and drinking and talking till the place was a regular bubble.”Joseph either meant Babel or a state of effervescence, both similes being applicable to the condition of the private apartments on the auspicious day, as it was called by Lord Henry, who played the part of “heavy father” in the genteel comedy in course of enactment.Then Joseph—who told himself he had never seen such a set-out since he came, a hungry page from the orphan school—wanted to know why Captain Glen, who had been so huffed about Miss Clotilde’s marriage, should be there, and look so jolly, and propose the health of the bride. “It seemed rum,” Joseph said, “though certainly him and Miss Marie looked pretty thick now, while little Mr Millet sat next to Miss Ruth,” who, to the man’s notions, was “the prettiest of the lot.”Joseph saw and heard a good deal. He saw Major Malpas place his glass in his dark eye, and, bringing the thick brow over it, stare very hard at the bride, who did not seem to mind it in the least—a fact which made the philosopher declare that “Miss Clo had got face enough for anything.”He also heard Major Malpas, who was perfect in his dress and handsome bearing, say to one of the guests who had made some remark respecting Glen’s appearance, that the Captain was a fine animal, that was all. “Too big for a soldier, sah. Looks like a big mastiff, sah, taking care of that little toy-terrier Millet.”Joseph’s notions of the wedding feast were very much after the fashion of the celebrated coat of his ancient namesake, of many colours, and those colours were terribly muddled up in his brain. They were bad enough before the matter of that five-pound note occurred; after that the unfortunate young man’s ideas were as if shaken up in a bottle to a state of neutral tint in which nothing was plain.He put that five-pound note, crumpled as it was, either in his breeches or his behind coat-pocket, but what became of it afterwards he could not tell. He might have taken it out to hold a hot plate, to use as a d’oyley, or to wipe his nose, or to dab up the wine that Mr Elbraham spilt when he upset his champagne-glass. He might or he mightn’t. He couldn’t say then. All he knew was that it muddled him, and that the dinner-bell hadn’t been rung, nor the form carried in for prayers.There was another idea came into his head, too, acting like so much leaven, or as an acid powder poured into the neutral alkaline solution already shaken up in his brain. There were those two waiters from Bunter’s standing by when Mr Elbraham gave him the five-pound note, and one of them winked at the other. Joseph could not say that one of those young men took that five-pound note. He was not going so far as to say it. What he was going to say was that they weren’t above taking two bottles of champagne back into the pantry and drinking them out of tumblers, and that a man who would take a bottle of wine that didn’t belong to him might go so far as a five-pound note.Joseph grew worse as the morning wore on. He felt as if he must go and quarrel with Markes, and a great deal of what he recalled after may have been nothing but the merest patchwork of nebulous theories of his own gathered together in a troublous time. For it was not likely that Captain Glen would have been standing holding Miss Ruth’s hand, and making her blush, as he called her his dear child, and said she was the best and sweetest little thing he had ever met, and that he should never forget her kindness and sympathy.Joseph certainly thought he heard Captain Glen say that, and he was near enough to have heard him say it; but he remembered afterwards that when he turned he caught sight of Mr Montaigne smiling in a peculiar way, but whether at him (Joseph), or at Captain Glen and Miss Ruth, he was not sure. It was a curious sort of smile, Joseph thought, exactly like that which Buddy’s old horse gave, drawing back its teeth before it tried to bite, and it made Joseph shiver.He might have been in everybody’s way or he might not, but the Honourable Philippa said that he was to stop about and make himself useful, and of course he did; for if cook chose to give up her kitchen to a set of foreign chiefs—he meantchefs—he was not going to be ousted by Bunter’s waiters, even if some of them were six feet high, and one of them looked like a nobleman’s butler. Miss Philippa said he was to make himself useful, and see that the visitors had plenty, and he did, though it was very funny to see how little some people took, though that wasn’t the case with others.It was while busying himself directly after the company had left the table that he came upon Captain Glen talking to Miss Ruth.No, it wasn’t Miss Ruth that time; it was Miss Marie. Yes, of course it was; and Captain Glen was saying:“No, Marie; I hope I am too much of a man to break my heart about a weak, vain woman. You saw how I behaved this morning? Well, I behaved as I felt—a little hurt, but heart-whole. Poor foolish girl! I trust that she will be happy.”“I hope so, too,” Marie had answered. “I am sorry, Captain Glen, and I am very glad.”“Why?” he asked.“Because I am sure that Clotilde would never have made you happy.”She gazed up at him in a curious way as she spoke, and it seemed to Joseph that Captain Glen looked puzzled and wondering. Then his face lit up, and he was going to speak to Miss Marie, when little Richard Millet came rushing up, saying:“I say, Glen, hang it all! play fair. Don’t monopolise the company of all the ladies. Miss Marie, may I have the pleasure?”He offered his arm as if he were going to take her through some dance instead of from the big landing amongst the flowers into the drawing-room; but instead of taking the offered arm, Joseph seemed to see that Miss Marie bowed gravely, and, looking handsome and queen-like, laid her hand upon the arm of Lord Henry Moorpark, who, very quiet and grave, had been hovering about ever since they rose from the table. Then the old gentleman had walked off with her, leaving little Mr Millet very cross, and it seemed to Joseph that he said something that sounded like a bar across a river, but whether it was weir or dam, Joseph’s brains were too much confused to recall.In fact, all this came out by degrees in the calm and solitude of his pantry, when he had recovered next day from a splitting headache; and then it was that he recalled how foolishly everybody behaved when Miss Clotilde—Mrs Elbraham, he meant—went off with her rich husband: how Miss Philippa wept upon her neck, and Miss Isabella trembled, and her hands shook, when she kissed the young wife; how Mr Montaigne seemed to bless her, and afterwards go and stand by Miss Ruth, taking her hand and drawing it through his arm, patting the hand at the same time in quite a fatherly way.Lady Anna Maria Morton, too, was there, standing with that stuck-up Mr “Rawthur” Litton, and Miss Marie with Lord Henry, and Lady Littletown, who seemed to have the management of the whole business, with Captain Glen; and at last, after the Honourable Philippa had kissed Mrs Elbraham once again, and then nearly fainted in little Dick Millet’s arms, the bride and bridegroom passed on towards the carriage, while people began to throw white slippers at them, and shower handfuls of rice, some of which fell on the bride’s bonnet and some upon the bridegroom, a good deal going down inside his coat-collar and some in his neck. But he went on smiling and bowing, and looking, Joseph thought, very much like a publican who had been dressed up in tight clothes, and then in consequence had burst into a profuse perspiration.Glen was standing close by the carriage with a half-laugh upon his face as the bridegroom passed, and Joseph thought he looked very tall and strong and handsome, and as if he would like to pitch Mr Elbraham into the middle of the fountain.And then, just as they were getting into the carriage, it seemed to Joseph that Miss Clotilde—he meant Mrs Elbraham, the rich financier’s wife—turned her head and looked at Captain Glen in a strange wild way, which made him turn aside and look at Miss Marie, when the bride went for the first time into a hysterical fit of sobbing as she was helped into the carriage, where Mr Elbraham followed her smiling red smiles. The steps were rattled up, the door banged, the footman waited a moment as the chariot moved away; and then sprang up into the rumble beside Mrs Elbraham’s maid, and away went the chariot as fast as four good post horses could take it towards London, bound for Charing Cross Station.What took place at the private apartments afterwards Joseph did not know, for long before the chariot had reached Richmond, the honest serving-man’s head was wedged in a corner between the press bedstead in the pantry and the wall, and his confused ideas had gone off into dreamland, apparently on the back of a snorting horse, bent on recovering a certain five-pound note which was required for tying up a white satin slipperful of rice, which had been emptied out of Mr Elbraham’s glass into a Lincoln and Bennett hat.End of Volume Two.
Palace Gardens, Kensington, was selected by Elbraham for the scene of his married life, and here he was to take the fair Clotilde upon their return from their Continental trip.
“It’s all bosh, Litton, that going across to Paris; and on one’s wedding day,” said the great financier. “Can’t we get off it?”
“Impossible, I should say,” replied Litton. “You see, you are bound to make yours the most stylish of the fashionable marriages of the season.”
“Oh yes, of course—that I don’t mind; and I’ll come out as handsome as you like for the things to do it with well; but I do kick against the run over to Paris the same day.”
“And why?” said Litton wonderingly.
“Well, the fact is, my boy, I never could go across the Channel without being terribly ill. Ill! that’s nothing to my feelings. I’m a regular martyr, and I feel disposed to strike against all that. Why not say the Lakes?”
“Too shabby and cockneyfied.”
“Wales?”
“Worse still.”
“Why not Scotland?”
“My dear sir, what man with a position to keep up would think of going there? I’ll consult Lady Littletown, if you like.”
“Lord, no; don’t do that,” said Elbraham. “She’s certain to say I must go to Paris; and so sure as ever I do have to cross, the Channel is at its worst.”
“But it is a very short passage, sir. You’ll soon be over; and in society a man of your position is forced to study appearances.”
“How the deuce can a fellow study appearances at a time like that?” growled Elbraham. “I always feel as if it would be a mercy to throw me overboard. ’Pon my soul I do.”
“I’ll see if I cannot fee the clerk of the weather for you, and get you a smooth passage this time,” said Litton, laughing; and the matter dropped.
There were endless other little matters to settle, in all of which Litton was the bridegroom’s ambassador, carrying presents, bringing back messages and notes, and in one way and another thoroughly ingratiating himself in Clotilde’s favour, that young lady condescending to smile upon him when he visited Hampton Court.
The Palace Gardens house was rapidly prepared, and, thanks to Arthur Litton, who had been consulted on both sides, and finally entrusted with the arrangements, everything was in so refined a style that there was but little room for envy to carp and condemn.
Certainly, Lady Littletown had had what Mr Elbraham called a finger in the pie, and had added no little by her advice and counsel in making the interior the model it was.
“For,” said Elbraham, in a little quiet dinner with her ladyship at Hampton, “I’m not particular to a few thousands. All I say is, let me have something to look at for my money; and I say, Litton, draw it mild, you know.”
“I don’t understand you,” said that gentleman. “Do you mean don’t have the decorations too showy?”
“Not I. Have ’em as showy as you like. Get out with you; how innocent we are!”
“Really, Mr Elbraham, I do not know what you mean,” said Litton stiffly.
“Go along with you,” chuckled Elbraham. “I say, draw it mild. Of course you’ll make your bit of commission with the furniture people; but draw it mild.”
Litton flushed with annoyance and indignation, probably on account of his having received a promise of a cheque for two hundred pounds from a firm if he placed the decorating and furnishing of Mr Elbraham’s new mansion in their hands.
A look from Lady Littletown quieted him, and that lady laughed most heartily.
“Oh, you funny man, Elbraham! really you are, you know, a very funny man.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” chuckled the financier; “I like my joke. But look here, Litton, I don’t get married every day, and want to do it well. I’m not going to put on the screw, I can tell you. You furnish the place spiff, and bring me the bills afterwards, and I’ll give you cheques for the amounts. If there is a bit of discount, have it and welcome; I shan’t complain so long as the thing is done well.”
So Arthur Litton contented himself with calling the financier “a coarse beast,” declined to be more fully offended, and aided by Lady Littletown, who worked hard for nothing but thekudos, furnished the house in admirable style, received the cheques from Elbraham, who really did pay without grumbling, and soothed his injured feelings with the very substantial commission which he received.
Upon one part of the decorations Lady Littletown prided herself immensely, and that was upon the addition to the drawing-room of a very spacious conservatory built upon the model of her own; and this she laboured hard to fill with choice foliage plants and gaily petalled exotics of her own selection.
Her carriage was seen daily at the principal florists’, and Elbraham had to write a very handsome cheque for what he called the “greenstuff”; but it was without a murmur, and he smiled with satisfaction as Lady Littletown triumphantly led him in to see the result of her toil.
“Yes,” he said, “tip-top—beats the C.P. hollow! Puts one a little in mind of what the Pantheon used to be when I was a boy.”
“But, my dear Elbraham, is thatallyou have to say?” exclaimed her ladyship.
“Well, since you put it like that, Lady Littletown, I won’t shilly-shally.”
“No, don’t—pray don’t. I like to hear you speak out, Elbraham—you are so original.”
“Oh, I am, am I?” he said. “Well, you know—well, I was going to say, don’t you think some of those statues are a little too prononsay, as you people call it, you know?”
“Naughty man!” exclaimed her ladyship. “I will not have fault found with a thing, especially as I brought our sweet Clotilde here, and she was perfectly charmed with all she saw. The flowers are really, really—”
“Well, they are not amiss,” said the financier; and he went up to a wreath of stephanotis with such evident intention of picking a “buttonhole” that Lady Littletown hooked him with the handle of her sunshade, uttering a scream of horror the while.
“Mustn’t touch—naughty boy!” she cried. “How could you?”
“Oh, all right,” said Elbraham, grinning hugely at the idea of not being allowed to touch his own property; and then he suffered himself to be led through the various rooms, one and all replete with the most refined luxuries of life.
“Now, you do think it is nice, my dear Elbraham?” said her ladyship.
“Nice? It’s clipping! Might have had a little more voluptuousness; but Litton says no, so I don’t complain. I say: Clotilde—you know, eh?”
“Yes, dear Elbraham. What of her?”
“She ought to be satisfied, eh?”
“She is charmed; she really loves the place. Come, I’ll tell you a secret. The darling—ah, but you’ll betray me?”
“No—honour bright!” cried Elbraham, laying his hand upon the side of his waistcoat.
“Well, I’ll tell you, then; but, mind, it is sacred.”
“Of course—of course.”
“The darling begged me to bring her up to see the delicious nest being prepared for her; but it was to be a stolen visit, for she said she could never look you in the face again if she thought you knew.”
“Dear girl!” ejaculated Elbraham. “Yes, she is so sweet and unworldly and innocent! Do you know, my dear Elbraham,” said Lady Littletown, “a man like you, for whom so many mothers were bidding—”
“Ah, yes, I used to get a few invitations,” said Elbraham complacently.
“I used to hear how terribly you flirted at Lady Millet’s with those two daughters,” said Lady Littletown playfully.
“By George! no. However, the old woman was always asking me to her at-homes and dinners, and to that wedding; but I never went.”
“I knew it,” said Lady Littletown to herself. “How mad she must be! Ah me!” she continued mournfully, “there are times when I feel as if I have done wrong in furthering this match.”
“The deuce you do! Why?” ejaculated Elbraham. “Because my sweet Clotilde is so unused to the ways of the world, and it is such a terrible stride from her present home to the head of such an establishment as this.”
“Oh, that be hanged!” cried Elbraham. “’Tis a change, of course—a precious great change from those skimpily-furnished apartments at Hampton Court.”
“But show is not everything, my dear Elbraham,” said Lady Littletown, laying a finger impressively upon the financier’s arm.
“No, it is not; but people like it. I’ll be bound to say Clotilde likes this place.”
“She was in raptures—she could hardly contain her delight. Her sweet innocent ways of showing her pleasure made my heart bound. Ah, Elbraham, you have won a prize!”
“So has she,” he said gruffly. “I don’t know but what she has got the best of the bargain.”
“Oh, you conceited man! how dare you say so? But it is only your quaintness.”
“I say, though,” cried Elbraham, “she did like the place?”
“I cannot tell you how much she was delighted.”
“Did she say anything about me?”
“Oh yes; she was prattling artlessly about you for long enough—about your kindness, your generosity, the richness of the jewels you had given her. You sadly extravagant man! I can’t tell you half what she said; but I really must take you to task for spoiling her so.”
Elbraham coughed and cleared his throat.
“Didn’t—er—er—she didn’t say anything about—about my dress—my personal appearance, did she?”
“Now, wasn’t I right when I called you a conceited man? Really, Elbraham, it is shocking! I declare you are one of the most anxious lovers I ever met, and I won’t tell you a word she said.”
“Oh yes; come now, do.”
“It would be a breach of confidence, and I really cannot give way—no, not on any consideration.”
“You are hard upon me,” said Elbraham. “Oh, by the way, I haven’t forgotten you, Lady Littletown. Would you wear this to oblige me?”
“Oh no, I could not think of taking it, Mr Elbraham really. It looks so like a bribe, too.”
“No, no, that it don’t,” said the financier. “I wouldn’t give it to you at first, for fear your ladyship should think I meant it in that way; but now it is all settled, and you have been so kind to me, I thought perhaps you would not mind accepting that little marquise ring just as a remembrance of, etcetera, etcetera—you know.”
“Well, if you put it like that,” said Lady Littletown, “I suppose I must take it, and wear it as you say. But it is too good, Elbraham—it is, really. What a lovely opal!”
“Yes, ’tis a good one, isn’t it?”
“Charming! And what regular diamonds!”
“I thought you’d like it,” chuckled Elbraham; and then, to himself, “They’re all alike.”
“Do you know, Elbraham,” said her ladyship, holding the ring up to the light for him to see, as she fitted it upon her finger over her glove—“lovely, isn’t it?—do you know, Elbraham, that I was going to ask you to do me a kindness?”
“Were you, though? What is it?”
“Well, you see, Elbraham, living, as I do, a woman’s life, I am so ignorant of business matters.”
“Of course you are,” he responded. “Want to make your will?”
“No, no, no, no! horrid man! How can you?” she cried, whipping him playfully with her sunshade. “I want you to tell me what it means when a gentleman is short of money and he goes to somebody to get a bill discounted.”
“Simplest thing in the world. If the paper’s good,” said Elbraham, “discount accordingly. I never touch bills now.”
“No?” she said sweetly; “but then you are so rich. But that is it, Elbraham—if the paper’s good, discount accordingly? What do you call it—the bill? Well, it is easy to have it on the very best note-paper.”
“Haw, haw, haw! bless your ladyship’s innocence!” cried Elbraham, with a hoarse laugh. “By paper being good I mean that the man who signs his name is substantial—can pay up when it comes to maturity.”
“Oh!” said Lady Littletown, drawing out the interjection in a singularly long way, “I see now. And that is how a gentleman raises money, is it?”
“Yes, that’s it,” said Elbraham, eyeing her ladyship curiously.
“Would not a lady do?” asked Lady Littletown.
“To be sure she would!” said the financier. “Lookye here—does your ladyship want a hundred or two?”
“Not to-morrow, dear Mr Elbraham; but my rents do not come in for another month, and I must confess to having been rather extravagant lately—I have had a great deal of company, and I thought I might—might—might—what do you call it?”
“Do a bill.”
“Yes, that’s it—do a bill,” said her ladyship, “if some kind friend would show me how.”
“It’s done,” said Elbraham. “What would you like—two-fifty?”
“Well, yes,” said her ladyship.
“Better make it three hundred—looks better,” said the financier.
“But you are not to advance the money, dear Mr Elbraham. I could not take it of you.”
“All right; I shan’t have anything to do with it. Someone in the City will send your ladyship a slip of paper to sign, and the cheque will come by the next post. I say, though, what did Clotilde say?”
“Oh, I daren’t tell you. Really, you know—pray don’t press me—I couldn’t confess. Dear Clotilde would be so angry if I betrayed her—dear girl! I could not do that, you know.”
“Honour bright, I wouldn’t say a word for the world.”
“Well, it’s very shocking, you know, Elbraham, and I was quite astonished to hear her say it; but she is so innocent and girlish, and it came out so naturally that I forgave her.”
“But what did she say?”
“Oh, dear child,” she clapped her hands together with delight, and then covered her blushing face and cried, “Oh, Lady Littletown, I wish it was to-morrow!”
“By Jingo!” exclaimed the financier to himself, “so do I!”
Everybody being in the same mind, the wedding was hurried on. The trousseau was of the most splendid character, and Marie entered into the spirit of the affair with such eagerness that the sisters forbore to quarrel.
Mr Montaigne came and went far more frequently, and seemed to bless his pupils in an almost apostolic fashion.
“I would give much,” he said, with a gentle, pious look of longing, “to be able to perform the ceremony which joins two loving hearts.”
But three eminent divines were to tie that knot, and even if Mr Paul Montaigne had been in holy orders according to the rites and ceremonies of the English Church, his services would not have been demanded, and he contented himself with smiling benignly and offering a few kindly words of advice.
Miss Dymcox and the Honourable Isabella were rather at odds on the question of intimacy, and Captain Glen would have been religiously excluded from the precincts of Hampton Court Palace private apartments if the Honourable Philippa had had her way; but Lady Littletown took it as a matter of course that several of the officers of the barracks should be invited, to addéclatto the proceedings, and as the Honourable Isabella sided with her, invitation-cards were sent, and, for reasons that Glen could not have explained to himself, were accepted.
“Yes, I’ll go, if it’s only to show her that I am not cast down. I’ll go and see her married. I’ll see her sell herself into slavery, and I hope she may never repent her step.”
The next hour, though, he said he would not go, and he was about to keep to his determination, when Dick came in, and announced that he had received an invitation.
“You’ll go, of course?”
“Go? No; why should I?”
“Just to show that you are a man of the world; no woman should fool me and make me seem like the chap in the song—‘wasting in despair—die, because a woman’s fair’—you know. Oh, I’d go.”
Glen sat thinking for awhile.
“I wouldn’t be cut up, you know.”
“If I thought that she threw me over of her own free will, Dick, I would not care a sou; but I believe that wicked old hag, her aunt Philippa, has forced her into it.”
“Then you need not care a sou.”
“How do you know?”
“Marie told me she accepted Elbraham for his coin.”
“Yes; she intimated as much to me.”
“She did! When?”
“Oh, the other day—the last time I saw her—when I had been to the private apartments, you know.”
“Oh yes. Ah, to be sure,” said Dick, who seemed much relieved. “Oh, I’d go, dear boy; I would indeed.”
“I will go,” said Glen with energy; and on the appointed day he went.
Hampton Court had not seen a more brilliant wedding for years, and the preparations at the Honourable Misses Dymcox’s apartments so completely put Joseph off his head that he, the reputable young man who preached temperance to Buddy the flyman, and was carefully saving up all his money to add to the savings of Markes for the purpose of taking a lodging-house, was compelled to fly to stimulants to sustain him.
The very way in which the dining-room was “done up,” as he called it, “with flowers and things” staggered him, and it seemed no wonder that the greeny stone basin in the middle court should sound quite noisy as the big squirt in the centre made more ambitious efforts than usual to mount the sky, and the old gold and silver fish stared more wonderingly as they sailed round and round.
But Joseph was not alone in being off his head and flying to stimulants; even cook was as bad, and was found by Markes standing at the door and talking to a soldier—the greatest treason in Markes’ eyes that a woman could commit—and reprimanded thereon, with the consequence that cook rebounded like a spring, and struck the austere, temperate, unloving Markes.
It was no wonder, for the sacred department of cook had been invaded by strange men in white apparel to such an extent that from being angry she grew hysterical, and went to Markes, apologetic and meek, for comfort, vowing that she couldn’t “abear” soldiers; but she was so humbled by the austere damsel that she turned to Joseph, who administered to her from the same cup as that wherefrom he obtained his relief.
The wearers of the white caps and jackets brought abatterie de cuisine, bombarded and captured the room set apart for cooking, and then and there proceeded to build up strange edifices of sugar, concoct soups, sweets, and all and sundry of those meats which are used to furnish forth a wedding feast.
The cases of wines that came in took away Joseph’s breath, but he revived a little at the sight of the flowers, and shortly afterwards relapsed, staying in a peculiarly misty state of mind and a new suit of livery to the end of the proceedings, during which time he had a faint recollection of seeing the Honourable Philippa greatly excited and the Honourable Isabella very tremulous, as they went about in new dresses, made in the style worn by the late Queen Adelaide, making them both bear some resemblance to a couple of human sprigs of lavender, taken out, carefully preserved, from some old box, where they had been lying for the past half-century.
It was a very troublous time, and Joseph wished his head had been a little clearer than it was. Those wide-spreading Queen Adelaide bonnets and feathers seemed to dance before his eyes and to confuse him. So did the constantly arriving company; but, still, he recalled a great deal. For instance, he had a lively recollection of the smell of his “bokay,” as he called it; of the young ladies going to the service at the church and coming back in a carriage, behind which he stood with an enormous white favour and the bouquet in his breast, while some boys shouted “Hurray!” He remembered that, but it did not make him happy, for he could never settle it thoroughly in his own mind whether that “hurray” was meant for him or for the bride.
That affair of the bride, too, troubled Joseph a good deal, and, but for the respect in which he held the family, or the awe in which he stood of the Honourable Philippa, he would have resented it strongly.
Certainly there were only two horses to the carriage behind which Joseph stood, but it was a particularly good carriage, hired from a London livery stables, with capital horses and a superior driver, who looked quite respectable in the hat and coat kept on purpose for Buddy the fly-driver, although he grumbled at having to put them on, as Buddy had been intoxicated upon the last occasion of his wearing them, and had somewhat taken off their bloom through going back to his stables and wearing them while he lay down in the straw for a nap.
Upon that occasion Joseph had seriously lectured Buddy upon the evils of intemperance.
“Look at me,” he said; “I can drink a glass of ale without its hurting me.”
“Well, the things ain’t improved, suttenly,” said Buddy in a repentant tone. Then scornfully: “But as to you and your slooshun of biled brewer’s aperns that you calls ale, why, you might wet-nuss babies on it, and it wouldn’t hurt ’em so long as you didn’t do it when it’s sour.”
“But it’s a very, very bad habit, Buddy,” exclaimed Markes; “just look at that hat.”
“Ah, you’ll have worse jobs than that some of these days when you marries a sojer.”
Mrs Markes bounced out in disgust.
“How she do hate to hear the soldiers mentioned, surely,” chuckled Buddy. “Why, she can’t abear ’em. But she needn’t be so hard about a fellow getting a drop; it’s a great comfort. She don’t know what it is, and never got to that stage, Joe, when everything about you as you taste and touch and smell feels as if it was soft and nice, and as if you’d tumbled into a place as was nothing else but welwet.”
The result was that Buddy’s hat and coat were thoroughly taken in hand by Markes and furbished up, the overcoat having to be rubbed and turpentined and brushed till it was more in keeping with the style of a wedding garment, while the hat was ‘gone over’ with a sponge and flat-iron, to the production of a most unearthly gloss, anent which Buddy chaffed the new driver. But of course that was on account of jealousy, that he, the regular ladies’ coachman, and his musty-smelling, jangling fly and meagrimed horse should be set aside upon an occasion when there would have been “a bite to get and a sup o’ suthin’ just to wash out a fellow’s mouth,” For Buddy had a laudable desire to keep his mouth clean by washing it out; and he resented the insult to his dignity upon this occasion by going to the Mitre Tap, and washing out his mouth till he was unable to take this clean mouth home.
As the Dymcoxes sported so dashing a turn-out, and Joseph handed in the bride and took her to church, what he wanted to know was why Elbraham should take her back in his four-horse chariot. Of course he would take her away in it afterwards; but according to Joseph’s idea it would have been far more respectful to the Honourable Dymcoxes if Elbraham had come with his young wife in the hired carriage along with him.
This was a trouble to Joseph, which he objected to largely, wearing a soured and ill-used look on the way back from Hampton Church; and he was not a great deal better when, meeting Elbraham on the staircase, that gentleman slipped a five-pound note in his hand.
The bride looked very beautiful, and Joseph heard that she wore real lace, and it covered her nearly from top to toe. The white satin dress, too, was wonderfully stiff and good, while her bouquet, sent, with those for the bridesmaids, in so many neat wooden boxes from the central avenue of Covent Garden, was “quite a picter,” so Joseph said.
But somehow it was all a muddle, and Joseph could make neither head nor tail of it. He felt as if he must seize and ring the dinner-bell, or carry in the form for prayers. For instance, there was that Lord Henry Moorpark there, and Captain Glen and Mr Richard Millet, who had tipped him over and over again, and ought to have married the ladies. They were there, and so was that tall, dark Major Malpas, who always “looked at him as if he had been a dorg; and lots more people crowding into the rooms, and a-eating and drinking and talking till the place was a regular bubble.”
Joseph either meant Babel or a state of effervescence, both similes being applicable to the condition of the private apartments on the auspicious day, as it was called by Lord Henry, who played the part of “heavy father” in the genteel comedy in course of enactment.
Then Joseph—who told himself he had never seen such a set-out since he came, a hungry page from the orphan school—wanted to know why Captain Glen, who had been so huffed about Miss Clotilde’s marriage, should be there, and look so jolly, and propose the health of the bride. “It seemed rum,” Joseph said, “though certainly him and Miss Marie looked pretty thick now, while little Mr Millet sat next to Miss Ruth,” who, to the man’s notions, was “the prettiest of the lot.”
Joseph saw and heard a good deal. He saw Major Malpas place his glass in his dark eye, and, bringing the thick brow over it, stare very hard at the bride, who did not seem to mind it in the least—a fact which made the philosopher declare that “Miss Clo had got face enough for anything.”
He also heard Major Malpas, who was perfect in his dress and handsome bearing, say to one of the guests who had made some remark respecting Glen’s appearance, that the Captain was a fine animal, that was all. “Too big for a soldier, sah. Looks like a big mastiff, sah, taking care of that little toy-terrier Millet.”
Joseph’s notions of the wedding feast were very much after the fashion of the celebrated coat of his ancient namesake, of many colours, and those colours were terribly muddled up in his brain. They were bad enough before the matter of that five-pound note occurred; after that the unfortunate young man’s ideas were as if shaken up in a bottle to a state of neutral tint in which nothing was plain.
He put that five-pound note, crumpled as it was, either in his breeches or his behind coat-pocket, but what became of it afterwards he could not tell. He might have taken it out to hold a hot plate, to use as a d’oyley, or to wipe his nose, or to dab up the wine that Mr Elbraham spilt when he upset his champagne-glass. He might or he mightn’t. He couldn’t say then. All he knew was that it muddled him, and that the dinner-bell hadn’t been rung, nor the form carried in for prayers.
There was another idea came into his head, too, acting like so much leaven, or as an acid powder poured into the neutral alkaline solution already shaken up in his brain. There were those two waiters from Bunter’s standing by when Mr Elbraham gave him the five-pound note, and one of them winked at the other. Joseph could not say that one of those young men took that five-pound note. He was not going so far as to say it. What he was going to say was that they weren’t above taking two bottles of champagne back into the pantry and drinking them out of tumblers, and that a man who would take a bottle of wine that didn’t belong to him might go so far as a five-pound note.
Joseph grew worse as the morning wore on. He felt as if he must go and quarrel with Markes, and a great deal of what he recalled after may have been nothing but the merest patchwork of nebulous theories of his own gathered together in a troublous time. For it was not likely that Captain Glen would have been standing holding Miss Ruth’s hand, and making her blush, as he called her his dear child, and said she was the best and sweetest little thing he had ever met, and that he should never forget her kindness and sympathy.
Joseph certainly thought he heard Captain Glen say that, and he was near enough to have heard him say it; but he remembered afterwards that when he turned he caught sight of Mr Montaigne smiling in a peculiar way, but whether at him (Joseph), or at Captain Glen and Miss Ruth, he was not sure. It was a curious sort of smile, Joseph thought, exactly like that which Buddy’s old horse gave, drawing back its teeth before it tried to bite, and it made Joseph shiver.
He might have been in everybody’s way or he might not, but the Honourable Philippa said that he was to stop about and make himself useful, and of course he did; for if cook chose to give up her kitchen to a set of foreign chiefs—he meantchefs—he was not going to be ousted by Bunter’s waiters, even if some of them were six feet high, and one of them looked like a nobleman’s butler. Miss Philippa said he was to make himself useful, and see that the visitors had plenty, and he did, though it was very funny to see how little some people took, though that wasn’t the case with others.
It was while busying himself directly after the company had left the table that he came upon Captain Glen talking to Miss Ruth.
No, it wasn’t Miss Ruth that time; it was Miss Marie. Yes, of course it was; and Captain Glen was saying:
“No, Marie; I hope I am too much of a man to break my heart about a weak, vain woman. You saw how I behaved this morning? Well, I behaved as I felt—a little hurt, but heart-whole. Poor foolish girl! I trust that she will be happy.”
“I hope so, too,” Marie had answered. “I am sorry, Captain Glen, and I am very glad.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I am sure that Clotilde would never have made you happy.”
She gazed up at him in a curious way as she spoke, and it seemed to Joseph that Captain Glen looked puzzled and wondering. Then his face lit up, and he was going to speak to Miss Marie, when little Richard Millet came rushing up, saying:
“I say, Glen, hang it all! play fair. Don’t monopolise the company of all the ladies. Miss Marie, may I have the pleasure?”
He offered his arm as if he were going to take her through some dance instead of from the big landing amongst the flowers into the drawing-room; but instead of taking the offered arm, Joseph seemed to see that Miss Marie bowed gravely, and, looking handsome and queen-like, laid her hand upon the arm of Lord Henry Moorpark, who, very quiet and grave, had been hovering about ever since they rose from the table. Then the old gentleman had walked off with her, leaving little Mr Millet very cross, and it seemed to Joseph that he said something that sounded like a bar across a river, but whether it was weir or dam, Joseph’s brains were too much confused to recall.
In fact, all this came out by degrees in the calm and solitude of his pantry, when he had recovered next day from a splitting headache; and then it was that he recalled how foolishly everybody behaved when Miss Clotilde—Mrs Elbraham, he meant—went off with her rich husband: how Miss Philippa wept upon her neck, and Miss Isabella trembled, and her hands shook, when she kissed the young wife; how Mr Montaigne seemed to bless her, and afterwards go and stand by Miss Ruth, taking her hand and drawing it through his arm, patting the hand at the same time in quite a fatherly way.
Lady Anna Maria Morton, too, was there, standing with that stuck-up Mr “Rawthur” Litton, and Miss Marie with Lord Henry, and Lady Littletown, who seemed to have the management of the whole business, with Captain Glen; and at last, after the Honourable Philippa had kissed Mrs Elbraham once again, and then nearly fainted in little Dick Millet’s arms, the bride and bridegroom passed on towards the carriage, while people began to throw white slippers at them, and shower handfuls of rice, some of which fell on the bride’s bonnet and some upon the bridegroom, a good deal going down inside his coat-collar and some in his neck. But he went on smiling and bowing, and looking, Joseph thought, very much like a publican who had been dressed up in tight clothes, and then in consequence had burst into a profuse perspiration.
Glen was standing close by the carriage with a half-laugh upon his face as the bridegroom passed, and Joseph thought he looked very tall and strong and handsome, and as if he would like to pitch Mr Elbraham into the middle of the fountain.
And then, just as they were getting into the carriage, it seemed to Joseph that Miss Clotilde—he meant Mrs Elbraham, the rich financier’s wife—turned her head and looked at Captain Glen in a strange wild way, which made him turn aside and look at Miss Marie, when the bride went for the first time into a hysterical fit of sobbing as she was helped into the carriage, where Mr Elbraham followed her smiling red smiles. The steps were rattled up, the door banged, the footman waited a moment as the chariot moved away; and then sprang up into the rumble beside Mrs Elbraham’s maid, and away went the chariot as fast as four good post horses could take it towards London, bound for Charing Cross Station.
What took place at the private apartments afterwards Joseph did not know, for long before the chariot had reached Richmond, the honest serving-man’s head was wedged in a corner between the press bedstead in the pantry and the wall, and his confused ideas had gone off into dreamland, apparently on the back of a snorting horse, bent on recovering a certain five-pound note which was required for tying up a white satin slipperful of rice, which had been emptied out of Mr Elbraham’s glass into a Lincoln and Bennett hat.
End of Volume Two.