BEHOLD, IT WAS A DREAM!CHAPTER I.
BEHOLD, IT WAS A DREAM!
Yesterdaymorning I received the following letter:
“Weston House, Caulfield, ——shire.“My dear Dinah,—Youmustcome: I scorn all your excuses, and see through their flimsiness. I have no doubt that you are much better amused in Dublin, frolicking round ball-rooms with a succession of horse-soldiers, and watching her Majesty’s household troops play Polo in the Phœnix Park, but no matter—youmustcome. We have no particularinducements to hold out. We lead an exclusively bucolic, cow-milking, pig-fattening, roast-mutton-eating and to-bed-at-ten-o’clock-going life; but no matter—youmustcome. I want you to see how happy two dull elderly people may be, with no special brightness in their lot to make them so. My old man—he is surprisingly ugly at the first glance, but grows upon one afterwards—sends you his respects, and bids me say that he will meet you atanystation onanyday atanyhour of the day or night. If you succeed in evading our persistence this time, you will be a cleverer woman than I take you for.“Ever yours affectionately,“Jane Watson.“August 15th.“P.S.—We will invite our little scarlet-headed curate to dinner to meet you, so as to soften your fall from the society of the Plungers.”
“Weston House, Caulfield, ——shire.
“My dear Dinah,—Youmustcome: I scorn all your excuses, and see through their flimsiness. I have no doubt that you are much better amused in Dublin, frolicking round ball-rooms with a succession of horse-soldiers, and watching her Majesty’s household troops play Polo in the Phœnix Park, but no matter—youmustcome. We have no particularinducements to hold out. We lead an exclusively bucolic, cow-milking, pig-fattening, roast-mutton-eating and to-bed-at-ten-o’clock-going life; but no matter—youmustcome. I want you to see how happy two dull elderly people may be, with no special brightness in their lot to make them so. My old man—he is surprisingly ugly at the first glance, but grows upon one afterwards—sends you his respects, and bids me say that he will meet you atanystation onanyday atanyhour of the day or night. If you succeed in evading our persistence this time, you will be a cleverer woman than I take you for.
“Ever yours affectionately,“Jane Watson.
“August 15th.
“P.S.—We will invite our little scarlet-headed curate to dinner to meet you, so as to soften your fall from the society of the Plungers.”
This is my answer:
“My dear Jane,—Kill the fat calf in all haste, and put the bake meats into the oven, for I will come. Do not, however, imagine that I am moved thereunto by the prospect of the bright-headed curate. Believe me, my dear, I am as yet at a distance of ten long good years from an addiction to the minor clergy. If I survive the crossing of that seething, heaving, tumbling abomination, St. George’s Channel, you may expect me on Tuesday next. I have been groping for hours in ‘Bradshaw’s’ darkness that may be felt, and I have arrived at length at this twilight result, that I may arrive at your station at 6·55P.M.But the ways of ‘Bradshaw’ are not our ways, and Imayeither rush violently past or never attain it. If I do, and if on my arrival I see some rustic vehicle, guided by a startlingly ugly gentleman, awaiting me, Ishall know from your wifely description that it is your ‘old man.’ Till Tuesday, then,“Affectionately yours,“Dinah Bellairs.“August 17th.”
“My dear Jane,—Kill the fat calf in all haste, and put the bake meats into the oven, for I will come. Do not, however, imagine that I am moved thereunto by the prospect of the bright-headed curate. Believe me, my dear, I am as yet at a distance of ten long good years from an addiction to the minor clergy. If I survive the crossing of that seething, heaving, tumbling abomination, St. George’s Channel, you may expect me on Tuesday next. I have been groping for hours in ‘Bradshaw’s’ darkness that may be felt, and I have arrived at length at this twilight result, that I may arrive at your station at 6·55P.M.But the ways of ‘Bradshaw’ are not our ways, and Imayeither rush violently past or never attain it. If I do, and if on my arrival I see some rustic vehicle, guided by a startlingly ugly gentleman, awaiting me, Ishall know from your wifely description that it is your ‘old man.’ Till Tuesday, then,
“Affectionately yours,“Dinah Bellairs.
“August 17th.”
I am as good as my word; on Tuesday I set off. For four mortal hours and a half I am disastrously, hideously, diabolically sick. For four hours and a half I curse the day on which I was born, the day on which Jane Watson was born, the day on which her old man was born, and lastly—but oh! not,notleastly—the day and the dock on which and in which theLeinster’splunging, courtseying, throbbing body was born. On arriving at Holyhead, feeling convinced from my sensations that, as the French say, I touch my last hour, I indistinctly request to be allowed to stay on board anddie, then and there; but as the stewardess and my maid take a different view of mysituation, and insist upon forcing my cloak and bonnet on my dying body and limp head, I at length succeed in staggering on deck and off the accursed boat. I am then well shaken up for two or three hours in the Irish mail, and after crawling along a slow by-line for two or three hours more, am at length, at 6·55, landed, battered, tired, dust-blacked, and qualmish, at the little roadside station of Caulfield. My maid and I are the only passengers who descend. The train snorts its slow way onwards, and I am left gazing at the calm crimson death of the August sun, and smelling the sweet-peas in the station-master’s garden border. I look round in search of Jane’s promised tax-cart, and steel my nerves for the contemplation of her old man’s unlovely features. But the only vehicle which I see is a tiny two-wheeled pony carriage, drawn by a small and tub-shaped bay pony and driven by a lady in a hat, whose face is turnedexpectantly towards me. I go up and recognise my friend, whom I have not seen for two years—not since before she fell in with her old man and espoused him.
“I thought it safest, after all, to come myself,” she says with a bright laugh. “My old man looked so handsome this morning, that I thought you would never recognise him from my description. Get in, dear, and let us trot home as quickly as we can.”
I comply, and for the next half hour sit (while the cool evening wind is blowing the dust off my hot and jaded face) stealing amazed glances at my companion’s cheery features.Cheery!That is the very last word that, excepting in an ironical sense, any one would have applied to my friend Jane two years ago. Two years ago Jane was thirty-five, the elderly eldest daughter of a large family, hustled into obscurity, jostled, shelved, by half a dozen younger, fresher sisters; anelderly girl addicted to lachrymose verse about the gone and the dead and the for-ever-lost. Apparently the gone has come back, the dead resuscitated, the for-ever-lost been found again. The peaky sour virgin is transformed into a gracious matron, with a kindly, comely face, pleasure making and pleasure feeling. Oh, Happiness, what powder, or paste, or milk of roses, can make old cheeks young again in the cunning way that you do? If you would but bide steadily with us we might live for ever, always young and always handsome.
My musings on Jane’s metamorphosis, combined with a tired headache, make me somewhat silent, and indeed there is mostly a slackness of conversation between the two dearest allies on first meeting after absence—a sort of hesitating shiver before plunging into the sea of talk that both know lie in readiness for them.
“Have you got your harvest in yet?” I ask,more for the sake of not utterly holding my tongue than from any profound interest in the subject, as we jog briskly along between the yellow cornfields, where the dry bound sheaves are standing in golden rows in the red sunset light.
“Not yet,” answers Jane; “we have only just begun to cut some of it. However, thank God, the weather looks as settled as possible; there is not a streak of watery lilac in the west.”
My headache is almost gone and I am beginning to think kindly of dinner—a subject from which all day until now my mind has hastily turned with a sensation of hideous inward revolt—by the time that the fat pony pulls up before the old-world dark porch of a modest little house, which has bashfully hidden its original face under a veil of crowded clematis flowers and stalwart ivy. Set as in a picture-frame by the large drooped ivy-leaves, I see atall and moderately hard-featured gentleman of middle age, perhaps, of the two, rather inclining towards elderly, smiling at us a little shyly.
“This is my old man,” cries Jane, stepping gaily out, and giving him a friendly introductory pat on the shoulder. “Old man, this is Dinah.”
Having thus been made known to each other we shake hands, but neither of us can arrive at anything pretty to say. Then I follow Jane into her little house, the little house for which she has so happily exchanged her tenth part of the large and noisy paternal mansion. It is an old house, and everything about it has the moderate shabbiness of old age and long and careful wear. Little thick-walled rooms, dark and cool, with flowers and flower scents lying in wait for you everywhere—a silent, fragrant, childless house. To me, who have had oily locomotives snorting andracing through my head all day, its dumb sweetness seems like heaven.
“And now that we have secured you, we do not mean to let you go in a hurry,” says Jane hospitably that night at bedtime, lighting the candles on my dressing-table.
“You are determined to make my mouth water, I see,” say I, interrupting a yawn to laugh. “Lone lorn me, who have neither old man nor dear little house, nor any prospect of ultimately attaining either.”
“But if you honestly are not bored you will stay with us a good bit?” she says, laying her hand with kind entreaty on my sleeve. “St. George’s Channel is not lightly to be faced again.”
“Perhaps I shall stay until you are obliged to go away yourselves to get rid of me,” return I, smiling. “Such things have happened. Yes, without joking, I will stay a month. Then, by the end of a month, if you have not found meout thoroughly, I think I may pass among men for a more amiable woman than I have ever yet had the reputation of.”
A quarter of an hour later I am laying down my head among soft and snow-white pillows, and saying to myself that this delicious sensation of utter drowsy repose, of soft darkness and odorous quiet, is cheaply purchased even by the ridiculous anguish which my own sufferings, and—hardly less than my own sufferings—the demoniac sights and sounds afforded by my fellow-passengers, caused me on board the accursedLeinster—
“Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark.”