Volume Two—Chapter Six.How Lady Martlett Humbled the Doctor.“I hate him, and I’ll humble him yet!” said Lady Martlett, with her eyes flashing, as she saw Jack Scales coming along the path towards the drawing-room window. “How dares he assume such a high tone towards me! How dares he speak to me as if I were an inferior, or a woman at whom he laughs as unworthy of his notice! I will humble him, proud as he may be.” She watched him through the window as he walked very thoughtfully along the path; and probably it was anger that made her countenance show a higher colour than usual. The visit did not seem pleasant. The weather was all that could be desired; but there was to her something unrestful in the atmosphere. Kate Scarlett was nervous and excited, for some reason or other, and was constantly leaving her alone. Aunt Sophia had seemed more touchy than usual; and Naomi looked as if she were afraid of the visitor.Lady Martlett had come, telling herself that she wanted company; now she was at The Rosery, she felt that she wanted to be alone. And now that, for the second time, Lady Scarlett had left her alone, she had been sitting fretfully, and thinking it very tiresome that she should be left.Then came the sound of the footsteps of the doctor—a doctor who would have treated her complaint to perfection, had she not scornfully declared to herself that it was out of his power, and that he was an ignorant pretender, who did not understand her ailment in the least; and at last her eyes filled with tears.“I’m a miserable woman!” she said to herself, as she called to mind the fact that she was a very rich young widow with beauty and a title; that there were scores of opportunities for making a good match, did she wish to wed; that she had only to give an order to have it obeyed; and—yes—here was this careless, indifferent young doctor, always ready to insult her, always treating her with a cool flippancy of manner, metaphorically snapping his fingers at her beauty of person, her title, and her wealth, and all the time utterly refusing to become her slave.Just then, Lady Martlett uttered a low sigh, biting her lip directly after, in vexation at her weakness, for Scales had sauntered by the French window, engagingly open as it was like a trap, with her inside as a most attractive bait, and without so much as once glancing in.“I believe he knows I’m in here alone,” she said to herself angrily; “and he has gone by on purpose to pique me. It is his conceit. He thinks I care for him. Oh, it is unbearable!” she cried impetuously. “I’ll bring him as a supplicant to my knees; and when I do,” she continued, with a flash of triumph in her dark eyes, “he shall know what it is to have slighted and laughed at me!”She fanned her flaming cheeks, and started up to pace the room, when once more there was the sound of the doctor’s footsteps, as, in utter ignorance of Lady Martlett’s presence, he returned along the gravel walk, thinking deeply over the knotty points of his patient’s case.Lady Martlett threw herself back in her seat, composed her features, but could not chase away the warm flush of resentment upon her checks. She, however, assumed an air of haughty languor, and appeared to be gazing at the landscape framed in by the open window.“Heigh-ho-ha-hum!” sighed, or rather half-yawned Jack Scales, as he turned in at the window very slowly and thoughtfully, and for the moment did not see that the room was occupied.Lady Martlett put her own interpretation upon the noise made by the doctor—she mentally called it a sigh, and her heart gave a satisfied throb as she told herself that he was touched—that her triumph was near at hand when she would humble him; and then—well, cast him off.“Ah, Lady Martlett, you here?” he said coolly.—“What a lovely day!”“Yes, doctor; charming,” she said, softening her voice.“And this is a lovely place.—Your home, the Court, is, of course, far more pretentious.”“I was not aware that there was anything pretentious about Leigh Court,” said Lady Martlett coldly.“Well, pretentious is perhaps not the word,” said Jack, “I mean big and important, and solid and wealthy, and that sort of thing.”“Oh, I see,” said Lady Martlett.“And what I meant was, that this place is so much more charming, with its undulating lawn, its bosky clumps of evergreens, the pillar roses, and that wonderful clematis of which poor Scarlett is so fond.”“You speak like a house-agent’s catalogue. Doctor Scales,” said Lady Martlett scornfully.“Yes, I do; don’t I?” said Jack quietly, “But do you know, Lady Martlett, I often think that I could turn out a better description of a country estate than some of those fellows do?”“Indeed?” said her Ladyship. “Yes, indeed,” said Jack, who eagerly assumed his bantering tones as soon as he was alone with Lady Martlett, telling himself it was a rest, and that it was a necessity to bring down her Ladyship’s haughtiness.“Dang her! I’ll make her thoroughly disgusted with me,” he said to himself. “I hate the handsome Semiramis!—She’d like to drag me at her chariot-wheels, and she shall not.”“I believe,” he continued, “that I could do something far better than the well-known specimen about the litter of rose-leaves and the noise of the nightingales.”“Indeed, doctor,” said her Ladyship, with a curl of her lip.“O yes,” cried Scales. “Now, for instance, suppose that Leigh Court were to be let.”“Leigh Court is not likely to be let,” said her Ladyship haughtily.“No?” said the doctor, raising his eyebrows slightly. “Well, perhaps not, though one never knows. Your Ladyship might take a dislike to it, say; and if it were to go into the estate-agent’s list—”“It never will, Doctor Scales! I should consider it a profanation,” said her Ladyship haughtily. “Pray, change the subject.”“Oh, certainly,” said Scales politely.—“Been up to the Academy, of course?”“Yes,” said Lady Martlett coldly. “There was nothing, though, worth looking at. I was terribly bored.”“Hah! I suppose you would be. I had a couple of hours. All I could spare. There is some admirable work there, all the same.”“I was not aware that Doctor Scales was an art critic.”“Neither was I; but when I see a landscape that is a faithful rendering of nature in some beautiful or terrible mood, I cannot help admiring it.”“Some people profess to be very fond of pictures.”“I am one of those foolish people, Lady Martlett.”“And have you a valuable collection, Doctor Scales?”“Collection? Well, I have a folio with a few water-colours in it, given me by artist friends instead of fees, and I have a few photographs; that is about all. As to their value—well, if sold, they would perhaps fetch thirty shillings.”Lady Martlett looked at him angrily, for she felt that he was assuming poverty to annoy her.“Your Ladyship looks astonished; but I can assure you that a poor crotchety physician does not get much besides the thanks of grateful patients.”“I noticed that there were a great many portraits at the Academy,” said her Ladyship, “portraits of great and famous men.”“Yes; of men, too, who are famous without being great,” said the doctor, laughing.“Indeed!” said Lady Martlett. “I thought the two qualities went together.”“In anyone else,” said Jack, “that would be a vulgar error: in your Ladyship, of course, though it may be an error, it cannot be vulgar.”“How dearly I should like to box your ears!” thought Lady Martlett, as she gazed at the provoking face before her. “He doesn’t respect me a bit. He doesn’t care for me. The man is a very stone.”“Did you notice the portraits of some of the fashionable beauties, Doctor Scales?” she continued, ignoring his compliment, and leading him back to the topic on hand.“O yes,” he said; “several of them, and it set me thinking.”“No? Really!” said her Ladyship, with a mocking laugh. “Was Doctor Scales touched by the beauty of some of the painted canvases with speaking eyes?”“No; not a bit,” he said cheerily—“not a bit. It set me wondering how it was that Lady Martlett’s portrait was not on the walls.”“I am not a fashionable beauty,” said the lady haughtily.“Well, let us say a beauty, and not fashionable.”A flash of triumph darted from Lady Martlett’s eyes. He had granted, then, that she was beautiful—at last.But Jack Scales saw the look.“I have no desire to be painted for an exhibition,” said Lady Martlett quietly.“But I thought all ladies loved to be admired.”“Surely not all,” she replied. “Are all women so weak?”“Well, I don’t know. That is a question that needs discussing. I am disposed to think they are. It is a woman’s nature; and when she does not care for admiration, she is either very old, or there is something wrong.”“Why, you libel our sex.”“By no means, madam. I did not say that they love the admiration of many. Surely she must be a very unpleasant woman indeed who does not care for the admiration of one man.”“He is caught!” thought Lady Martlett, with a strange feeling of triumph. Perhaps there was something else in her sensation, but she would not own it then.“Perhaps you are right,” she said quietly. “It may be natural; but in these days, Doctor Scales, education teaches us to master our weakness.”“Which most of us do,” he said, with a bow, “But really, if your Ladyship’s portrait, painted by a masterly hand, had been hung.”—He stopped short, as if thinking how to say his next words.“Well, doctor?” she said, giving him a look that he caught, weighed, and valued on the instant at its true worth.“It would have had a crowd around it to admire.”“The artist’s work, doctor?”“No, madam; the beauty of the features the artist had set himself to limn.”“Is this a compliment, doctor, or a new form of bantering Lady Scarlett’s guest?” said the visitor, rather bitterly.“Neither the one nor the other, but the simple truth.”Lady Martlett fought hard to conceal the exultation; nay, more, the thrill of pleasure that ran through her nerves as she heard these words; but though outwardly she seemed quite calm, her cheeks were more highly coloured than usual, and her voice sounded deeper and more rich.Jack Scales told himself she was plotting to humble him to the very dust, so he stood upon his guard.Perhaps he did not know himself. Who does? If he had, he might have acted differently as he met Lady Martlett’s eyes when she raised hers and said; “Ah, then, Doctor Scales has turned courtier and flatterer.”“No; I was speaking very sincerely.”“Ought I to sit here,” said Lady Martlett, “and listen to a gentleman who tells me I am more handsome than one of the fashionable beauties of the season?”“Why not?” he said, smiling. “Is the truthful compliment so displeasing?”“No,” she said softly; “I do not think it is;” and beneath her lowered lashes, the look of triumph intensified as she led him on to speak more plainly.“It ought not to be,” he said, speaking warmly now. “I have paid you a compliment, Lady Martlett, but it is in all sincerity.”“He will be on his knees to me directly,” she thought, “and then—”“For,” he continued, “woman generally is a very beautiful work of creation: complicated, wonderful—mentally and corporeally—perfect.”“Perfect, Doctor Scales?”“Yes, madam; perfect. Your Ladyship, for instance, is one of the most—I think I may saythemost perfect woman I ever saw.”“Doctor Scales?” she said quickly, as she drew herself up, half-angry, but thoroughly endorsing his words; and then to herself, in the triumph that flushed her as she saw the animation in his eyes and the colour in his checks: “At last he is moved; he never spoke or looked like that before.” Then aloud: “You are really very complimentary, Doctor Scales;” and she gave him a sharp arrow-like glance, that he saw was barbed with contempt.“Well, yes, Lady Martlett, I suppose I am,” he said; “but it was truly honest, and I will be frank with you. Really, I never come into your presence—I never see you—But no; I ought not to venture to say so much.”“Why not?” she said, with an arch look. “I am not a silly young girl, but a woman who has seen something of the world.”“True, yes,” he said, as if encouraged; and Lady Martlett’s bosom rose and fell with the excitement of her expected triumph.Still he hesitated, and asked himself whether he was misjudging her in his belief that she intended to lead him on to a confession of his love, and then cast him off with scorn and insult; but as he looked at her handsome face and shifting eager eyes, he told himself that there was something mingled with the partiality for him which she might possess, and he became hard as steel.“Well,” she said, smiling, and that smile had in it a power that nearly brought him to her feet; “you were saying: ‘I never see you’—”“Exactly. Yes,” he said quickly; “I will say it. You’ll pardon me, I know. I am but a weak man, with an intense love—”She drew a long breath, and half turned away her head.“For the better parts of my profession.” Lady Martlett’s face became fixed, and she listened to him intently.“Yes; I confess I do love my profession, and I never see you in your perfection of womanly beauty, without feeling an intense desire to dissect you.”Lady Martlett started up from the seat, where, in a studied attitude, she had well displayed the graceful undulations of her figure, and stood before Jack Scales, proud, haughty, and indignant. Her eyes flashed; there was an ardent colour in her cheeks, which then seemed to flood back to her heart, leaving her white with anger.“How dare you!” she began, in the mortification and passion that came upon her; and then, thoroughly mastered, and unable to control herself longer, she burst into a wild hysterical fit of laughter and hurried out of the room.Jack Scales rose and stood watching the door as it swung to, and there was a look of tenderness and regret in his countenance as he muttered: “Too bad—too bad! Brutal and insulting! And to a woman—a lady of her position and refinement! I’ll go and beg her pardon—ask her to forgive me—make confession of why I spoke so.—No. Put my head beneath her heel, to be crushed by her contempt! It wouldn’t do. She goaded me to it. She wants to triumph over me. I could read her looks. If she cared for me, and those looks were real, I’d go down upon my knees humbly and tell her my sorrow; and then—then—then—What should I do then?“Hah!” he cried, after a pause, “what would you do then, Jack Scales! Go away, and never set eyes upon her again, for it would not do. It is impossible, and I am a fool.” He stood with his brows knit for a few minutes, and then said, in quite a different mood: “And now I am a man of the world again. Yes; you are about the most handsome woman I ever saw; but a woman is but a woman to a doctor, be she titled or only a farmer’s lass. Blue blood is only a fiction after all; for if I blooded my lady there, pretty Fanny Cressy, and one of Brother William Cressy’s pigs into separate test tubes, and placed them in a rack; and if, furthermore, I left them for a few minutes, and some busybody took them up and changed their places, I might, when I returned, fiddle about for long enough with the various corpuscles, but I could not tell which was which.—Lady Martlett, I am your very obedient servant, but I am not going to be your rejected slave.”
“I hate him, and I’ll humble him yet!” said Lady Martlett, with her eyes flashing, as she saw Jack Scales coming along the path towards the drawing-room window. “How dares he assume such a high tone towards me! How dares he speak to me as if I were an inferior, or a woman at whom he laughs as unworthy of his notice! I will humble him, proud as he may be.” She watched him through the window as he walked very thoughtfully along the path; and probably it was anger that made her countenance show a higher colour than usual. The visit did not seem pleasant. The weather was all that could be desired; but there was to her something unrestful in the atmosphere. Kate Scarlett was nervous and excited, for some reason or other, and was constantly leaving her alone. Aunt Sophia had seemed more touchy than usual; and Naomi looked as if she were afraid of the visitor.
Lady Martlett had come, telling herself that she wanted company; now she was at The Rosery, she felt that she wanted to be alone. And now that, for the second time, Lady Scarlett had left her alone, she had been sitting fretfully, and thinking it very tiresome that she should be left.
Then came the sound of the footsteps of the doctor—a doctor who would have treated her complaint to perfection, had she not scornfully declared to herself that it was out of his power, and that he was an ignorant pretender, who did not understand her ailment in the least; and at last her eyes filled with tears.
“I’m a miserable woman!” she said to herself, as she called to mind the fact that she was a very rich young widow with beauty and a title; that there were scores of opportunities for making a good match, did she wish to wed; that she had only to give an order to have it obeyed; and—yes—here was this careless, indifferent young doctor, always ready to insult her, always treating her with a cool flippancy of manner, metaphorically snapping his fingers at her beauty of person, her title, and her wealth, and all the time utterly refusing to become her slave.
Just then, Lady Martlett uttered a low sigh, biting her lip directly after, in vexation at her weakness, for Scales had sauntered by the French window, engagingly open as it was like a trap, with her inside as a most attractive bait, and without so much as once glancing in.
“I believe he knows I’m in here alone,” she said to herself angrily; “and he has gone by on purpose to pique me. It is his conceit. He thinks I care for him. Oh, it is unbearable!” she cried impetuously. “I’ll bring him as a supplicant to my knees; and when I do,” she continued, with a flash of triumph in her dark eyes, “he shall know what it is to have slighted and laughed at me!”
She fanned her flaming cheeks, and started up to pace the room, when once more there was the sound of the doctor’s footsteps, as, in utter ignorance of Lady Martlett’s presence, he returned along the gravel walk, thinking deeply over the knotty points of his patient’s case.
Lady Martlett threw herself back in her seat, composed her features, but could not chase away the warm flush of resentment upon her checks. She, however, assumed an air of haughty languor, and appeared to be gazing at the landscape framed in by the open window.
“Heigh-ho-ha-hum!” sighed, or rather half-yawned Jack Scales, as he turned in at the window very slowly and thoughtfully, and for the moment did not see that the room was occupied.
Lady Martlett put her own interpretation upon the noise made by the doctor—she mentally called it a sigh, and her heart gave a satisfied throb as she told herself that he was touched—that her triumph was near at hand when she would humble him; and then—well, cast him off.
“Ah, Lady Martlett, you here?” he said coolly.—“What a lovely day!”
“Yes, doctor; charming,” she said, softening her voice.
“And this is a lovely place.—Your home, the Court, is, of course, far more pretentious.”
“I was not aware that there was anything pretentious about Leigh Court,” said Lady Martlett coldly.
“Well, pretentious is perhaps not the word,” said Jack, “I mean big and important, and solid and wealthy, and that sort of thing.”
“Oh, I see,” said Lady Martlett.
“And what I meant was, that this place is so much more charming, with its undulating lawn, its bosky clumps of evergreens, the pillar roses, and that wonderful clematis of which poor Scarlett is so fond.”
“You speak like a house-agent’s catalogue. Doctor Scales,” said Lady Martlett scornfully.
“Yes, I do; don’t I?” said Jack quietly, “But do you know, Lady Martlett, I often think that I could turn out a better description of a country estate than some of those fellows do?”
“Indeed?” said her Ladyship. “Yes, indeed,” said Jack, who eagerly assumed his bantering tones as soon as he was alone with Lady Martlett, telling himself it was a rest, and that it was a necessity to bring down her Ladyship’s haughtiness.
“Dang her! I’ll make her thoroughly disgusted with me,” he said to himself. “I hate the handsome Semiramis!—She’d like to drag me at her chariot-wheels, and she shall not.”
“I believe,” he continued, “that I could do something far better than the well-known specimen about the litter of rose-leaves and the noise of the nightingales.”
“Indeed, doctor,” said her Ladyship, with a curl of her lip.
“O yes,” cried Scales. “Now, for instance, suppose that Leigh Court were to be let.”
“Leigh Court is not likely to be let,” said her Ladyship haughtily.
“No?” said the doctor, raising his eyebrows slightly. “Well, perhaps not, though one never knows. Your Ladyship might take a dislike to it, say; and if it were to go into the estate-agent’s list—”
“It never will, Doctor Scales! I should consider it a profanation,” said her Ladyship haughtily. “Pray, change the subject.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Scales politely.—“Been up to the Academy, of course?”
“Yes,” said Lady Martlett coldly. “There was nothing, though, worth looking at. I was terribly bored.”
“Hah! I suppose you would be. I had a couple of hours. All I could spare. There is some admirable work there, all the same.”
“I was not aware that Doctor Scales was an art critic.”
“Neither was I; but when I see a landscape that is a faithful rendering of nature in some beautiful or terrible mood, I cannot help admiring it.”
“Some people profess to be very fond of pictures.”
“I am one of those foolish people, Lady Martlett.”
“And have you a valuable collection, Doctor Scales?”
“Collection? Well, I have a folio with a few water-colours in it, given me by artist friends instead of fees, and I have a few photographs; that is about all. As to their value—well, if sold, they would perhaps fetch thirty shillings.”
Lady Martlett looked at him angrily, for she felt that he was assuming poverty to annoy her.
“Your Ladyship looks astonished; but I can assure you that a poor crotchety physician does not get much besides the thanks of grateful patients.”
“I noticed that there were a great many portraits at the Academy,” said her Ladyship, “portraits of great and famous men.”
“Yes; of men, too, who are famous without being great,” said the doctor, laughing.
“Indeed!” said Lady Martlett. “I thought the two qualities went together.”
“In anyone else,” said Jack, “that would be a vulgar error: in your Ladyship, of course, though it may be an error, it cannot be vulgar.”
“How dearly I should like to box your ears!” thought Lady Martlett, as she gazed at the provoking face before her. “He doesn’t respect me a bit. He doesn’t care for me. The man is a very stone.”
“Did you notice the portraits of some of the fashionable beauties, Doctor Scales?” she continued, ignoring his compliment, and leading him back to the topic on hand.
“O yes,” he said; “several of them, and it set me thinking.”
“No? Really!” said her Ladyship, with a mocking laugh. “Was Doctor Scales touched by the beauty of some of the painted canvases with speaking eyes?”
“No; not a bit,” he said cheerily—“not a bit. It set me wondering how it was that Lady Martlett’s portrait was not on the walls.”
“I am not a fashionable beauty,” said the lady haughtily.
“Well, let us say a beauty, and not fashionable.”
A flash of triumph darted from Lady Martlett’s eyes. He had granted, then, that she was beautiful—at last.
But Jack Scales saw the look.
“I have no desire to be painted for an exhibition,” said Lady Martlett quietly.
“But I thought all ladies loved to be admired.”
“Surely not all,” she replied. “Are all women so weak?”
“Well, I don’t know. That is a question that needs discussing. I am disposed to think they are. It is a woman’s nature; and when she does not care for admiration, she is either very old, or there is something wrong.”
“Why, you libel our sex.”
“By no means, madam. I did not say that they love the admiration of many. Surely she must be a very unpleasant woman indeed who does not care for the admiration of one man.”
“He is caught!” thought Lady Martlett, with a strange feeling of triumph. Perhaps there was something else in her sensation, but she would not own it then.
“Perhaps you are right,” she said quietly. “It may be natural; but in these days, Doctor Scales, education teaches us to master our weakness.”
“Which most of us do,” he said, with a bow, “But really, if your Ladyship’s portrait, painted by a masterly hand, had been hung.”—He stopped short, as if thinking how to say his next words.
“Well, doctor?” she said, giving him a look that he caught, weighed, and valued on the instant at its true worth.
“It would have had a crowd around it to admire.”
“The artist’s work, doctor?”
“No, madam; the beauty of the features the artist had set himself to limn.”
“Is this a compliment, doctor, or a new form of bantering Lady Scarlett’s guest?” said the visitor, rather bitterly.
“Neither the one nor the other, but the simple truth.”
Lady Martlett fought hard to conceal the exultation; nay, more, the thrill of pleasure that ran through her nerves as she heard these words; but though outwardly she seemed quite calm, her cheeks were more highly coloured than usual, and her voice sounded deeper and more rich.
Jack Scales told himself she was plotting to humble him to the very dust, so he stood upon his guard.
Perhaps he did not know himself. Who does? If he had, he might have acted differently as he met Lady Martlett’s eyes when she raised hers and said; “Ah, then, Doctor Scales has turned courtier and flatterer.”
“No; I was speaking very sincerely.”
“Ought I to sit here,” said Lady Martlett, “and listen to a gentleman who tells me I am more handsome than one of the fashionable beauties of the season?”
“Why not?” he said, smiling. “Is the truthful compliment so displeasing?”
“No,” she said softly; “I do not think it is;” and beneath her lowered lashes, the look of triumph intensified as she led him on to speak more plainly.
“It ought not to be,” he said, speaking warmly now. “I have paid you a compliment, Lady Martlett, but it is in all sincerity.”
“He will be on his knees to me directly,” she thought, “and then—”
“For,” he continued, “woman generally is a very beautiful work of creation: complicated, wonderful—mentally and corporeally—perfect.”
“Perfect, Doctor Scales?”
“Yes, madam; perfect. Your Ladyship, for instance, is one of the most—I think I may saythemost perfect woman I ever saw.”
“Doctor Scales?” she said quickly, as she drew herself up, half-angry, but thoroughly endorsing his words; and then to herself, in the triumph that flushed her as she saw the animation in his eyes and the colour in his checks: “At last he is moved; he never spoke or looked like that before.” Then aloud: “You are really very complimentary, Doctor Scales;” and she gave him a sharp arrow-like glance, that he saw was barbed with contempt.
“Well, yes, Lady Martlett, I suppose I am,” he said; “but it was truly honest, and I will be frank with you. Really, I never come into your presence—I never see you—But no; I ought not to venture to say so much.”
“Why not?” she said, with an arch look. “I am not a silly young girl, but a woman who has seen something of the world.”
“True, yes,” he said, as if encouraged; and Lady Martlett’s bosom rose and fell with the excitement of her expected triumph.
Still he hesitated, and asked himself whether he was misjudging her in his belief that she intended to lead him on to a confession of his love, and then cast him off with scorn and insult; but as he looked at her handsome face and shifting eager eyes, he told himself that there was something mingled with the partiality for him which she might possess, and he became hard as steel.
“Well,” she said, smiling, and that smile had in it a power that nearly brought him to her feet; “you were saying: ‘I never see you’—”
“Exactly. Yes,” he said quickly; “I will say it. You’ll pardon me, I know. I am but a weak man, with an intense love—”
She drew a long breath, and half turned away her head.
“For the better parts of my profession.” Lady Martlett’s face became fixed, and she listened to him intently.
“Yes; I confess I do love my profession, and I never see you in your perfection of womanly beauty, without feeling an intense desire to dissect you.”
Lady Martlett started up from the seat, where, in a studied attitude, she had well displayed the graceful undulations of her figure, and stood before Jack Scales, proud, haughty, and indignant. Her eyes flashed; there was an ardent colour in her cheeks, which then seemed to flood back to her heart, leaving her white with anger.
“How dare you!” she began, in the mortification and passion that came upon her; and then, thoroughly mastered, and unable to control herself longer, she burst into a wild hysterical fit of laughter and hurried out of the room.
Jack Scales rose and stood watching the door as it swung to, and there was a look of tenderness and regret in his countenance as he muttered: “Too bad—too bad! Brutal and insulting! And to a woman—a lady of her position and refinement! I’ll go and beg her pardon—ask her to forgive me—make confession of why I spoke so.—No. Put my head beneath her heel, to be crushed by her contempt! It wouldn’t do. She goaded me to it. She wants to triumph over me. I could read her looks. If she cared for me, and those looks were real, I’d go down upon my knees humbly and tell her my sorrow; and then—then—then—What should I do then?
“Hah!” he cried, after a pause, “what would you do then, Jack Scales! Go away, and never set eyes upon her again, for it would not do. It is impossible, and I am a fool.” He stood with his brows knit for a few minutes, and then said, in quite a different mood: “And now I am a man of the world again. Yes; you are about the most handsome woman I ever saw; but a woman is but a woman to a doctor, be she titled or only a farmer’s lass. Blue blood is only a fiction after all; for if I blooded my lady there, pretty Fanny Cressy, and one of Brother William Cressy’s pigs into separate test tubes, and placed them in a rack; and if, furthermore, I left them for a few minutes, and some busybody took them up and changed their places, I might, when I returned, fiddle about for long enough with the various corpuscles, but I could not tell which was which.—Lady Martlett, I am your very obedient servant, but I am not going to be your rejected slave.”
Volume Two—Chapter Seven.The Doctor Discourses.“My back’s a sight better, sir, wi’ that stuff you said I was to get, and I thank you kindly for it,” said John Monnick, as the doctor seated himself one day close by where the old man was busy weeding a bed in the flower-garden—a special task that he would not entrust to any one else.“I’m glad of it, Monnick—very glad.”“But master don’t seem no better, sir, if you’ll excuse me for saying so.”“Yes, Monnick, I’ll excuse you,” said the doctor sadly. “As you say, he is very little better if any. I’m afraid that pond emptying began the work the accident finished.”“It frets me, sir, it do—it do indeed. For only to think of it: him so stout and straight and hearty one day, and as wan and thin and bad the next as an old basket. Ah! it’s a strange life this here.”“True Monnick, true,” said the doctor.“I felt a bit cut up when his father died, sir, but thank the Lord he aren’t here now to see the boy as he ’most worshipped pulled down as he be. Why, I were down in Sucksix, sir, in the marshes, for two years, ’twix’ Hastings and Rye, and I had the ager awful bad, but it never pulled me down like this. Do try your best with Sir James, do, pray.”“I will, Monnick, I will,” said the doctor.Monnick went on with his weeding, and the doctor sat watching in a low-spirited way the motions of a beautiful little robin that kept popping down and seizing some worm which, alarmed by the disturbance of the ground, was trying to escape.“What humbug popular favouritism is,” he exclaimed suddenly.“Beg pardon, sir,” said Monnick, glad of an excuse to straighten his back.“I say what humbug there is in the world,” said the doctor. “Look at that robin, Monnick.”“Yes, sir; he be a pretty one too. There’s lots on ’em here, and welcome as rain.”“Yes,” said the doctor, “but what humbug it is.”Monnick stared, and the robin hopped on the top of a garden stick and chirruped a few notes.“Just imagine,” said the doctor, who was in a didactic mood; “try and imagine a stout, well-built man, six feet high, a fine, handsome brawny savage, seizing a boa constrictor in his teeth, shaking the, say, eighteen feet of writhing bone and muscle till it had grown weak and limp, and, by a complete reverse of all rule, swallowing the lengthy monster without an effort. The idea partakes of the nature of the serpent, and is monstrous; but all the same, that little petted and be-praised impostor will hop up to a great earthworm three times his length, give it a few digs with his sharp beak, and then—as the Americans would say—get outside it apparently without effort or ruffling a feather, after which he will hop away, flit to a twig, and indulge in a short, sharp song of triumph over his deed. It is his nature to, no doubt, and so are a good many more of his acts; but in these days, when it has grown to be the custom to run tilt at no end of our cherished notions; when we are taught that Alfred did not burn the cakes; that Caractacus never made that pathetic speech about the wealth of Rome: it is only fair to strip the hypocritical feather cloak of hypocrisy off that flagrant little impostor, the robin.”“The robin and the wren be God’s cock and hen,” said John Monnick solemnly, pairing according to old custom two birds of different kinds.“Yes,” said the doctor, “and terrible are the penalties supposed to attach to the man or boy who takes the nest, steals the egg, or destroys old or young of their sacred progeny. As a matter of course, no one ever did take egg, nest, or destroy the young of this couple, inasmuch as they are two distinct birds.”“Yes, sir, two of ’em,” said John Monnick solemnly. “The robin and the wren be God’s cock and hen, and nobody never takes their eggs but jays and magpies and such like, robins is always the friends of man.”“Friend of man, eh?” said the doctor. “Well, go where you will, there is the pretty bird to be seen, with his orange-scarlet breast, olive-green back, and large, bright, intelligent eyes. Winter or summer, by the homestead, at the window-pane, amongst the shrubs of the garden, or in the wood, there is the robin ready to perch near you and watch your every act, while from time to time he favours you with his tuneful lay. All pure affection for man, of course—so the unobservant have it, and so poets sing; when the fact of the matter is that the familiarity of the bird comes from what Mr Roger Riderhood termed ‘cheek,’ for, the sparrow not excepted, there is no bird in which the sense of fear seems so small; while the motive power which brings the pretty little fellow so constantly in man’s society is that love which is known as cupboard. Probably the robin first learned from Adam that when man begins to garden he turns up worms; and, as these ringed creepers are this bird’s daily bread, he has attached himself to man ever since, and will come and pick the worms from his very feet, whether it be in a garden or during a botanical ramble in the depths of some wood.”“Yes, sir,” said John Monnick, “they follows mankind everywhere. I’ve had ’em with me wherever I go.”“For worms, Monnick, and in winter they will come for crumbs to the window sill, or pick pieces of meat and gristle from the bones inside the dog’s kennel; while in autumn time, when the flies grow sluggish and little spiders fat, where is there a better hunting-ground than the inside of a house where there is an open window, or, best of all, a church? What other bird, it may be asked, would take delight in making its way into a country church to flit about as the robin will? A sparrow would awaken at once to its sacrilegious behaviour, and beat the window-pane to escape; a robin never. On the contrary, he seems to take delight in making the little boys laugh, in impishly attracting the attention of people from the ‘secondly’ and ‘thirdly’ of the sermon.”“Yes, sir, I’ve seed ’em pick the dog’s bones often, and Ihaveseen ’em in a church.”“Seen them, Monnick? Have seen them? Why, but the other day, in an old church with a regular three-decker pulpit, I saw a robin perch upon the cushion just over the parson’s head as he read the lessons, and mockingly begin to preach in song, indulging afterwards in a joyous flit round the church, out at the open door, and back again, to make a sharp snap with its bill at the flies. If, you might say, the robin bore love to man he would not play tricks in church.”“I don’t quite see what you’re a trying to sow on me, sir, but, you being a doctor, I suppose it’s all right,” said Monnick.“John Monnick,” said the doctor bitterly, “I am trying to give you a lesson on humbugs. Robins do not pair out of their station—out of their kind. Men do when they are wed, but the wisest do not. Robins pair with robins, not with wrens.”“Well, sir, I never seed ’em,” said Monnick, “but that’s what they say—the robin and the wren be God’s cock and hen.”“Stuff! Robins pair with robins. Should I, being a sparrow, pair with a swallow that flies high above me—three mullets on a field azure—flying across the blue sky.”“Well, no, sir,” said Monnick thoughtfully; “I suppose not.”“It would be humbug, John Monnick, humbug; and the robin is a humbug, John. As to his behaviour to his kind, it seems grievous to have to lift the veil that covers so much evil; but it must be done. What do you say to your belauded robin being one of the most sanguinary little monsters under the sun? Not merely is he a murderer of his kind, but he will commit parricide, matricide, or fratricide without the smallest provocation. Put half-a-dozen robins in an aviary, and go the next morning to see the result. I don’t say that, as in the case of the celebrated Kilkenny cats, there will be nothing left but one tail; but I guarantee that five of the robins will be dead, and the survivor in anything but the best of plumage, for a gamecock is not more pugnacious than our little friend.”“That be true enough, sir,” said John, rubbing his back softly, “I’ve seen ’em. But you must ha’ taken a mort o’ notice of ’em, sir. I didn’t know you ever see such things.”“You thought I dealt only in physic and lotions, John, eh? But I have noticed robins and a few other things. But about Cock Robin. It might be thought that this fighting propensity would only exist at pairing time, and that it was a question of fighting for the smiles of some fair Robinetta; but nothing of the kind: a robin will not submit to the presence of another in or on its beat, and will slay the intruder without mercy, or be slain in the attempt. It might almost be thought that the ruddy stain upon its breast-feathers was the proof-mark of some late victory, where the feathers had been imbrued in the victim’s blood; but I will not venture upon the imagery lest it should jar. It is no uncommon thing to see a couple of robins in a walk, flitting round each other with wings drooping and tails erect: they will bend and bow, and utter short, defiant notes, retreat, as if to take up more strategic positions, and, after an inordinate amount of fencing, dash in and fight till there seems to be a sort of feathery firework going off amongst the bushes; and so intent are they on their battle, so careless of man’s approach, that they may at times be picked up panting, exhausted, bleeding, and dying, holding tightly on to one another by their slender bills.”“Yes, sir, and I’ve picked ’em up dead more’n once.”“Ah! yes!Pace, good Doctor Watts, birds do not in their little nests agree, nor yet out of them. The old country idea is that in the autumn the young robins kill off the old: undoubtedly the strong do slay the weak. It can be often seen, and were it not so, we should have robins in plenty, instead of coming upon the solitary little fellows here and there, popping out silently like spies upon our every act. Come late autumn and wintry weather, the small birds can be seen in companies, sparrows and finches mixing up in friendly concourse; but the robin never seems to flock, but always to be comparatively scarce. He never joins their companies, though he comes in their midst to the window for wintry alms of crumbs, but when he does, as Artemus Ward would say, there is ‘a fite.’ He attacks the stranger birds all round, and audaciously takes the best pieces for himself, robins do not remain scarce from not being prolific, for you may find the nest a couple have built in an ivy tod, an old watering-pot, or in a corner of the toolshed, with five or six reddish blotchy eggs in it. They have two or three broods every season, while their brown speckled young ones, wanting in the olive and red of their ciders, are a cry familiar objects, hopping sedately about in the sunny summer-time.”“That be all true as gorspel, sir,” said Monnick. “Why, bless you, they’ve built in my toolshed, in watering-pots, and even in my shred-bag.”“Yes, Monnick, and now look here. I have shown what a murderer our small impostor is, and how, under his pleasant outward appearance, he has a nature that will stick at nothing for the gratification of self, even, as I must now show, at such a despicable act as theft. There are those who maintain that the robin’s mission is all for good, and that he is merely a destroyer of noxious insects, grubs, and worms; that he relieves the garden of myriads of blights, and eating, boring, and canker-producing pests. Granted: so he does, though it is very unpleasant for the unfortunate little insect that happens to be dubbed a pest to find itself within reach of that vicious bill and cavernous throat. But why cannot our young friend—for, in spite of his wickedness, we shall always call him friend for the pleasure he affords our eyes and ears, just as we wink at the private life of a great artist who gratifies the senses in his turn—but I repeat why cannot our young friend be content to ‘cry havock’ amongst the insect pests, and to peek from the dog’s basin, the pig’s trough, and the chickens’ food, and not, sit on some bare spray, or under the shadows of a thorny bush, and watch with those great earnest eyes of his till the ventilators of the glass-houses are open, and then flit—flutter—dash headlong in for a feast of grapes?”“They do, sir, they’re as bad as the wopses. Some gardeners say as robins never touch fruit, sir, but they do.”“Yes, John, you are right; they do, and most unmercifully. They pick out, as if by instinct, the ripest and best bunches of the great black Hambro’s, hang on to the stalks, and wherever these rich pearly black grapes have been well thinned and petted that they may grow to an abnormal size, dig dig go the wicked little beaks. If they would be content with a grape or two, and begin and finish them, or even four or five or six, it would not matter; but your robin is a sybarite in his way: he treats a grape-house as visitors with tasting orders used to treat the cellars of the docks. They did not want the wine, but they would fee the cooper, who would broach a cask here and another cask there, and all of the best, till the vinous sawdust was soaked with the waste, and the fumes produced a strange intoxicating effect. Very strange that, how intoxicating those fumes would be. Unfortunately, this juice of the grape is not fermented, and the robin goes on upon his destructive quest. Still there is one redeeming feature: he will brook no companion. One visitor at a time; two means battle royal, and flying feathers.”John Monnick scratched one red ear, for the doctor was taking him out of his depth, and he looked more puzzled still as the speaker went on.“To sum up, then, the robin is a compound of all that is audacious, gluttonous, vicious, cruel, and despicable; but he can sing, and his pleasant little note, mournful though it be, as it acts as harbinger of falling leaves, is as much associated with home and our native land as the bonny English rose, and that resource from chills and fogs, our own fireside. Never mind the superstitious penalties! Who is there among us who would kill a robin, or would take its nest? From earliest childhood till the days when Time’s hoar frost appears upon the hair, one greets the ruddy-breasted little rascal with a smile, and feeds him when his feathered friends and foes fall fast before the winter’s scythe. So loved is he, that in far-off foreign lands the nearest likeness to him is called a robin still. We can forgive him, and wink at all his sins, as he flits attendance where’er we go in country lane, and gladly greet him even in some suburban square; and even as I speak, I am fain to say—as his pretty little figure there greets my eye—what a nuisance it is to have to speak the truth! There, John Monnick, what do you think of that?”“It’s very good, sir, all as I could understand of it, but there’s some as wants hearing again and diegestin’ like, to get it all well into a man, as you may say. Going sir?”“Yes, John Monnick, I’m going to your master.”“Ay, do, sir, and if I might make so bold to say so, if you’d talk to him like you did to me about the robins and their taking his grapes, it would interest him like, and may be do him good. I’d dearly like to see Sir James himself again. It’s my belief he ’as got something on his mind?”“I would give something to be able to ease him, Monnick. Well, I’ll take your advice.”“Do, sir, do. Bless me, I could stand all day and hear you talk, sir, but I must be getting on. An’,” he added, as the doctor strolled off, “it’s curious, very curious, but I s’pose it’s all true, but I don’t kind o’ like to hear a man, even if he be a gentleman, upsetting all what you’ve been taught and cherished like.”He went on weeding for a few minutes, and then straightened himself once more.“The robin and the wren be God’s cock and hen. Well, now I come to think of it, I never see ’em together. P’r’aps the doctor’s right.”
“My back’s a sight better, sir, wi’ that stuff you said I was to get, and I thank you kindly for it,” said John Monnick, as the doctor seated himself one day close by where the old man was busy weeding a bed in the flower-garden—a special task that he would not entrust to any one else.
“I’m glad of it, Monnick—very glad.”
“But master don’t seem no better, sir, if you’ll excuse me for saying so.”
“Yes, Monnick, I’ll excuse you,” said the doctor sadly. “As you say, he is very little better if any. I’m afraid that pond emptying began the work the accident finished.”
“It frets me, sir, it do—it do indeed. For only to think of it: him so stout and straight and hearty one day, and as wan and thin and bad the next as an old basket. Ah! it’s a strange life this here.”
“True Monnick, true,” said the doctor.
“I felt a bit cut up when his father died, sir, but thank the Lord he aren’t here now to see the boy as he ’most worshipped pulled down as he be. Why, I were down in Sucksix, sir, in the marshes, for two years, ’twix’ Hastings and Rye, and I had the ager awful bad, but it never pulled me down like this. Do try your best with Sir James, do, pray.”
“I will, Monnick, I will,” said the doctor.
Monnick went on with his weeding, and the doctor sat watching in a low-spirited way the motions of a beautiful little robin that kept popping down and seizing some worm which, alarmed by the disturbance of the ground, was trying to escape.
“What humbug popular favouritism is,” he exclaimed suddenly.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said Monnick, glad of an excuse to straighten his back.
“I say what humbug there is in the world,” said the doctor. “Look at that robin, Monnick.”
“Yes, sir; he be a pretty one too. There’s lots on ’em here, and welcome as rain.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “but what humbug it is.”
Monnick stared, and the robin hopped on the top of a garden stick and chirruped a few notes.
“Just imagine,” said the doctor, who was in a didactic mood; “try and imagine a stout, well-built man, six feet high, a fine, handsome brawny savage, seizing a boa constrictor in his teeth, shaking the, say, eighteen feet of writhing bone and muscle till it had grown weak and limp, and, by a complete reverse of all rule, swallowing the lengthy monster without an effort. The idea partakes of the nature of the serpent, and is monstrous; but all the same, that little petted and be-praised impostor will hop up to a great earthworm three times his length, give it a few digs with his sharp beak, and then—as the Americans would say—get outside it apparently without effort or ruffling a feather, after which he will hop away, flit to a twig, and indulge in a short, sharp song of triumph over his deed. It is his nature to, no doubt, and so are a good many more of his acts; but in these days, when it has grown to be the custom to run tilt at no end of our cherished notions; when we are taught that Alfred did not burn the cakes; that Caractacus never made that pathetic speech about the wealth of Rome: it is only fair to strip the hypocritical feather cloak of hypocrisy off that flagrant little impostor, the robin.”
“The robin and the wren be God’s cock and hen,” said John Monnick solemnly, pairing according to old custom two birds of different kinds.
“Yes,” said the doctor, “and terrible are the penalties supposed to attach to the man or boy who takes the nest, steals the egg, or destroys old or young of their sacred progeny. As a matter of course, no one ever did take egg, nest, or destroy the young of this couple, inasmuch as they are two distinct birds.”
“Yes, sir, two of ’em,” said John Monnick solemnly. “The robin and the wren be God’s cock and hen, and nobody never takes their eggs but jays and magpies and such like, robins is always the friends of man.”
“Friend of man, eh?” said the doctor. “Well, go where you will, there is the pretty bird to be seen, with his orange-scarlet breast, olive-green back, and large, bright, intelligent eyes. Winter or summer, by the homestead, at the window-pane, amongst the shrubs of the garden, or in the wood, there is the robin ready to perch near you and watch your every act, while from time to time he favours you with his tuneful lay. All pure affection for man, of course—so the unobservant have it, and so poets sing; when the fact of the matter is that the familiarity of the bird comes from what Mr Roger Riderhood termed ‘cheek,’ for, the sparrow not excepted, there is no bird in which the sense of fear seems so small; while the motive power which brings the pretty little fellow so constantly in man’s society is that love which is known as cupboard. Probably the robin first learned from Adam that when man begins to garden he turns up worms; and, as these ringed creepers are this bird’s daily bread, he has attached himself to man ever since, and will come and pick the worms from his very feet, whether it be in a garden or during a botanical ramble in the depths of some wood.”
“Yes, sir,” said John Monnick, “they follows mankind everywhere. I’ve had ’em with me wherever I go.”
“For worms, Monnick, and in winter they will come for crumbs to the window sill, or pick pieces of meat and gristle from the bones inside the dog’s kennel; while in autumn time, when the flies grow sluggish and little spiders fat, where is there a better hunting-ground than the inside of a house where there is an open window, or, best of all, a church? What other bird, it may be asked, would take delight in making its way into a country church to flit about as the robin will? A sparrow would awaken at once to its sacrilegious behaviour, and beat the window-pane to escape; a robin never. On the contrary, he seems to take delight in making the little boys laugh, in impishly attracting the attention of people from the ‘secondly’ and ‘thirdly’ of the sermon.”
“Yes, sir, I’ve seed ’em pick the dog’s bones often, and Ihaveseen ’em in a church.”
“Seen them, Monnick? Have seen them? Why, but the other day, in an old church with a regular three-decker pulpit, I saw a robin perch upon the cushion just over the parson’s head as he read the lessons, and mockingly begin to preach in song, indulging afterwards in a joyous flit round the church, out at the open door, and back again, to make a sharp snap with its bill at the flies. If, you might say, the robin bore love to man he would not play tricks in church.”
“I don’t quite see what you’re a trying to sow on me, sir, but, you being a doctor, I suppose it’s all right,” said Monnick.
“John Monnick,” said the doctor bitterly, “I am trying to give you a lesson on humbugs. Robins do not pair out of their station—out of their kind. Men do when they are wed, but the wisest do not. Robins pair with robins, not with wrens.”
“Well, sir, I never seed ’em,” said Monnick, “but that’s what they say—the robin and the wren be God’s cock and hen.”
“Stuff! Robins pair with robins. Should I, being a sparrow, pair with a swallow that flies high above me—three mullets on a field azure—flying across the blue sky.”
“Well, no, sir,” said Monnick thoughtfully; “I suppose not.”
“It would be humbug, John Monnick, humbug; and the robin is a humbug, John. As to his behaviour to his kind, it seems grievous to have to lift the veil that covers so much evil; but it must be done. What do you say to your belauded robin being one of the most sanguinary little monsters under the sun? Not merely is he a murderer of his kind, but he will commit parricide, matricide, or fratricide without the smallest provocation. Put half-a-dozen robins in an aviary, and go the next morning to see the result. I don’t say that, as in the case of the celebrated Kilkenny cats, there will be nothing left but one tail; but I guarantee that five of the robins will be dead, and the survivor in anything but the best of plumage, for a gamecock is not more pugnacious than our little friend.”
“That be true enough, sir,” said John, rubbing his back softly, “I’ve seen ’em. But you must ha’ taken a mort o’ notice of ’em, sir. I didn’t know you ever see such things.”
“You thought I dealt only in physic and lotions, John, eh? But I have noticed robins and a few other things. But about Cock Robin. It might be thought that this fighting propensity would only exist at pairing time, and that it was a question of fighting for the smiles of some fair Robinetta; but nothing of the kind: a robin will not submit to the presence of another in or on its beat, and will slay the intruder without mercy, or be slain in the attempt. It might almost be thought that the ruddy stain upon its breast-feathers was the proof-mark of some late victory, where the feathers had been imbrued in the victim’s blood; but I will not venture upon the imagery lest it should jar. It is no uncommon thing to see a couple of robins in a walk, flitting round each other with wings drooping and tails erect: they will bend and bow, and utter short, defiant notes, retreat, as if to take up more strategic positions, and, after an inordinate amount of fencing, dash in and fight till there seems to be a sort of feathery firework going off amongst the bushes; and so intent are they on their battle, so careless of man’s approach, that they may at times be picked up panting, exhausted, bleeding, and dying, holding tightly on to one another by their slender bills.”
“Yes, sir, and I’ve picked ’em up dead more’n once.”
“Ah! yes!Pace, good Doctor Watts, birds do not in their little nests agree, nor yet out of them. The old country idea is that in the autumn the young robins kill off the old: undoubtedly the strong do slay the weak. It can be often seen, and were it not so, we should have robins in plenty, instead of coming upon the solitary little fellows here and there, popping out silently like spies upon our every act. Come late autumn and wintry weather, the small birds can be seen in companies, sparrows and finches mixing up in friendly concourse; but the robin never seems to flock, but always to be comparatively scarce. He never joins their companies, though he comes in their midst to the window for wintry alms of crumbs, but when he does, as Artemus Ward would say, there is ‘a fite.’ He attacks the stranger birds all round, and audaciously takes the best pieces for himself, robins do not remain scarce from not being prolific, for you may find the nest a couple have built in an ivy tod, an old watering-pot, or in a corner of the toolshed, with five or six reddish blotchy eggs in it. They have two or three broods every season, while their brown speckled young ones, wanting in the olive and red of their ciders, are a cry familiar objects, hopping sedately about in the sunny summer-time.”
“That be all true as gorspel, sir,” said Monnick. “Why, bless you, they’ve built in my toolshed, in watering-pots, and even in my shred-bag.”
“Yes, Monnick, and now look here. I have shown what a murderer our small impostor is, and how, under his pleasant outward appearance, he has a nature that will stick at nothing for the gratification of self, even, as I must now show, at such a despicable act as theft. There are those who maintain that the robin’s mission is all for good, and that he is merely a destroyer of noxious insects, grubs, and worms; that he relieves the garden of myriads of blights, and eating, boring, and canker-producing pests. Granted: so he does, though it is very unpleasant for the unfortunate little insect that happens to be dubbed a pest to find itself within reach of that vicious bill and cavernous throat. But why cannot our young friend—for, in spite of his wickedness, we shall always call him friend for the pleasure he affords our eyes and ears, just as we wink at the private life of a great artist who gratifies the senses in his turn—but I repeat why cannot our young friend be content to ‘cry havock’ amongst the insect pests, and to peek from the dog’s basin, the pig’s trough, and the chickens’ food, and not, sit on some bare spray, or under the shadows of a thorny bush, and watch with those great earnest eyes of his till the ventilators of the glass-houses are open, and then flit—flutter—dash headlong in for a feast of grapes?”
“They do, sir, they’re as bad as the wopses. Some gardeners say as robins never touch fruit, sir, but they do.”
“Yes, John, you are right; they do, and most unmercifully. They pick out, as if by instinct, the ripest and best bunches of the great black Hambro’s, hang on to the stalks, and wherever these rich pearly black grapes have been well thinned and petted that they may grow to an abnormal size, dig dig go the wicked little beaks. If they would be content with a grape or two, and begin and finish them, or even four or five or six, it would not matter; but your robin is a sybarite in his way: he treats a grape-house as visitors with tasting orders used to treat the cellars of the docks. They did not want the wine, but they would fee the cooper, who would broach a cask here and another cask there, and all of the best, till the vinous sawdust was soaked with the waste, and the fumes produced a strange intoxicating effect. Very strange that, how intoxicating those fumes would be. Unfortunately, this juice of the grape is not fermented, and the robin goes on upon his destructive quest. Still there is one redeeming feature: he will brook no companion. One visitor at a time; two means battle royal, and flying feathers.”
John Monnick scratched one red ear, for the doctor was taking him out of his depth, and he looked more puzzled still as the speaker went on.
“To sum up, then, the robin is a compound of all that is audacious, gluttonous, vicious, cruel, and despicable; but he can sing, and his pleasant little note, mournful though it be, as it acts as harbinger of falling leaves, is as much associated with home and our native land as the bonny English rose, and that resource from chills and fogs, our own fireside. Never mind the superstitious penalties! Who is there among us who would kill a robin, or would take its nest? From earliest childhood till the days when Time’s hoar frost appears upon the hair, one greets the ruddy-breasted little rascal with a smile, and feeds him when his feathered friends and foes fall fast before the winter’s scythe. So loved is he, that in far-off foreign lands the nearest likeness to him is called a robin still. We can forgive him, and wink at all his sins, as he flits attendance where’er we go in country lane, and gladly greet him even in some suburban square; and even as I speak, I am fain to say—as his pretty little figure there greets my eye—what a nuisance it is to have to speak the truth! There, John Monnick, what do you think of that?”
“It’s very good, sir, all as I could understand of it, but there’s some as wants hearing again and diegestin’ like, to get it all well into a man, as you may say. Going sir?”
“Yes, John Monnick, I’m going to your master.”
“Ay, do, sir, and if I might make so bold to say so, if you’d talk to him like you did to me about the robins and their taking his grapes, it would interest him like, and may be do him good. I’d dearly like to see Sir James himself again. It’s my belief he ’as got something on his mind?”
“I would give something to be able to ease him, Monnick. Well, I’ll take your advice.”
“Do, sir, do. Bless me, I could stand all day and hear you talk, sir, but I must be getting on. An’,” he added, as the doctor strolled off, “it’s curious, very curious, but I s’pose it’s all true, but I don’t kind o’ like to hear a man, even if he be a gentleman, upsetting all what you’ve been taught and cherished like.”
He went on weeding for a few minutes, and then straightened himself once more.
“The robin and the wren be God’s cock and hen. Well, now I come to think of it, I never see ’em together. P’r’aps the doctor’s right.”
Volume Two—Chapter Eight.Old John is Paternal, and Fanny Makes a Promise.“Now do give me a rose, Mr Monnick; do, please.”“Give you a rose, my dear?” said John Monnick, pausing in his task of thinning out the superabundant growth amongst the swelling grapes. “Well, I don’t like to refuse you anything, though it do seem a shame to cut the poor things, when they look so much prettier on the trees.”“Oh, but I like to have one to wear, Mr Monnick, to pin in my breast.”“And then, as soon as it gets a bit faded, my dear, you chucks it away.”“O no; not if it’s a nice one, Mr Monnick. I put it in water afterwards, and let it recover.”“Putting things in water, ’specially masters, don’t always make ’em recover, my dear,” said the old man, picking out and snapping off a few more shoots. “Hah!” he cried, after a good sniff at the bunch of succulent pieces, and then placing one acid tendrilled scrap in his mouth, twisting it up, and munching it like some ruminating animal—“smell that, my dear; there’s a scent!” and he held out the bunch to the pretty coquettish-looking maid.“De-licious, Mr Monnick,” said the girl, taking a long sniff at the shoots. “And now you will give me a nice pretty rosebud, won’t you?”“I allus observe,” said the old man thoughtfully, going on with his work, “that if you want something, Fanny, you calls me Mister Monnick; but if I ask you to do anything for me, or you have an order from Sir James or my lady, it’s nothing but plain John.”“Oh, I don’t always think to call you Mr Monnick,” said the girl archly.—“But I must go now. Do give me a nice just opening bud.”“Well, if you’ll be a good girl, and promise only to take one, I’ll give you leave to fetch your scissors and cut a Homer.”“What! one of those nasty common-looking little dirty pinky ones?” cried the girl. “No, thank you; I want one of those.” As she spoke, she pointed to a trellis at the end of the greenhouse, over which was trailed the abundant growth of a hook-thorned climbing rose.“What, one o’ my Ma’shal Niels?” cried the old gardener. “I should just think not. Besides,” he added with a grim smile, “yaller wouldn’t suit your complexion.”“Now, don’t talk stuff,” cried the girl. “Yellow does suit dark people.—Do cut me one, there’s a dear good man.”“Yes,” said the old man; “and then, next time you get washing out your bits o’ lace and things, you’ll go hanging ’em to dry on my trained plants in the sun.”“No; I won’t. There, I promise you I’ll never do so any more.”“Till nex’ time.—I say, Fanny, when’s Mr Arthur going back to London?”“I don’t know,” said the girl, rather sharply. “How can I tell?”“Oh, I thought p’r’aps he might have been telling you last night.”“Telling me last night!” echoed the girl. “Where should he be telling me?”“Why, down the field-walk, to be sure, when he was a-talking to you.”“That I’m sure he wasn’t,” cried the girl, changing colour.“Well, he was a-wagging his chin up and down and making sounds like words; and so was you, Fanny, my dear.”“Oh, how can you say so!”“This way,” said the old man, facing her and speaking very deliberately. “What was he saying to you?”“I—I wasn’t—”“Stop a moment,” said the old man. “Mr Arthur Prayle’s such a religious-spoken sort o’ gent, that I dessay he was giving you all sorts o’ good advice, and I’m sure he wouldn’t like you to tell a lie.”“I’m not telling a lie; I’m not.—Oh, you wicked, deceitful, spying old thing!” she cried, bursting into tears. “How dare you come watching me!”“I didn’t come watching you, my dear. I was down there with a pot, picking up the big grey slugs that come out o’ the field into the garden; for they feeds the ducks, and saves my plants as well.—Now, lookye here, my dear; you’re a very pretty girl, and it’s very nice to be talked to by a young man, I dare say. I never cared for it myself; but young women do.”“How dare you speak to me like that!” cried the girl, flaming up.“’Cause I’m an old man, and knows the ways o’ the world, my dear. Mr Arthur comes down the garden to me and gives me bits o’ religious instruction and advice like; but if he wants to give any to you, I think he ought to do it in the house, and give it to Martha Betts and cook at the same time.”“It’s all a wicked story,” cried Fanny angrily; “and I won’t stop here to be insulted!”“Don’t, my dear. But I’m going to walk over to your brother William’s to-night, and have a bit o’ chat with him ’bout things in general, and I thought I’d give him my opinion on the pynte.”Fanny had reached the door of the vinery; but these words stopped her short, and she came back with her face changing from red to white and back again. “You are going to tell my brother William?”“Yes, my dear, as is right and proper too. Sir James aren’t fit to be talked to; and it’s a thing as I couldn’t say to her ladyship. It aren’t in the doctor’s way; and if I was to so much as hint at it to Miss Raleigh, she’d snap my head off, and then send you home.”Fanny stood staring mutely with her lips apart at the old gardener, who went on deliberately snapping out the shoots, and staring up at the roof with his head amongst the vines. One moment her eyes flashed; the next they softened and the tears brimmed in them. She made a movement towards the old man where he sat perched upon his steps calmly ruminating with his mouth full of acid shoots; then, in a fit of indignation, she shrank back, but ended by going close up to him and laying her hand upon his arm.“Leave that now,” she said.“Nay, nay, my lass; I’ve no time to spare. Here’s all these shoots running away with the jushe and strength as ought to go into the grapes; and the master never touches them now. It all falls upon my shoulders since he’s ill.”“Yes, yes; you work very hard; but I want to talk to you a minute.”“Well; there then,” he said. “Now, what is it?” and he left off his task to select a nice fresh tendril to munch.“You—you won’t tell Brother William.”“Ay, but I shall, lass. Why, what do it matter to you, if it was all a lie and you warn’t there?”“But William will think it was me, Mr Monnick; and he issoparticular; and—There, I’ll confess it, was me.”“Thankye,” said the old man, with a grim smile; “but my eyes are not had enough to make a mistake.”“But you won’t tell William?”“It aren’t pleasant for you, my dear; but you’ll thank me for it some day.”“But it would make such trouble. William would come over and see Mr Prayle; and you know how violent my brother can be. There’s plenty of trouble in the house without that.”“I don’t know as William Cressy would be violent, my dear. He’s a very fine young fellow, and as good a judge o’ gardening as he be of his farm. He be very proud of his sister: and he said to me one day—”“William said—to you?”“Yes, my dear, to me, over a quiet pipe, as he had along o’ me one evening in my tool-house. ‘John Monnick,’ he says, ‘our Fanny’s as pretty a little lass as ever stepped, and some day she’ll be having a chap.’”“Having a chip!” said Fanny, with her lip curling in disgust.“‘And that’s all right and proper, if he’s a good sort; but I’m not going to have her take up with anybody, and I’m not going to have her fooled.’”“I wish William would mind his own business,” cried Fanny, stamping her foot. “He’s got a deal to talk about; coming and staring at a stupid housemaid.”“Martha Betts aren’t stupid, my dear, and a housemaid’s is a very honourable situation. The first woman as ever lived in a house must have been a housemaid, just the same as the first man was a gardener. Don’t you sneer at lowly occupations. Everything as is honest is good.”“Oh, yes, of course. But you won’t tell William?”“I feel, my dear, as if I must,” said the old man, taking the girl’s hand, and patting it softly. “You’re a very pretty little lass, and it’s quite right that you should have a sweetheart.”“Sweetheart, indeed!” cried Fanny in disgust,“But that there Mr Arthur aren’t the right sort.”“How do you know?” cried the girl defiantly.“’Cause I’m an old man as has seen a deal of the world, my dear, and I’ve got a granddaughter just like you. I shouldn’t have thought it of Mr Arthur, and I don’t know as I shan’t speak to him about it myself.”“Oh no, no!” cried the girl excitedly. “Pray, don’t do that.”The old man loosed her hand to sit gazing thoughtfully before him, while the girl once more grasped his arm.“There’s on’y one thing as would make me say I wouldn’t speak to William Cressy and Mr Arthur.”“And what’s that?” cried the girl.“You a-giving of me your solemn promise as you won’t let Mr Arthur talk to you again.”“I’ll promise,” cried the girl. “Yes,” said the old man; “it’s easy enough to promise; but will you keep it?”“Yes, yes, that I will.”“You see he’s a gentleman, and you’re only a farmer’s daughter, my dear; and he wouldn’t think no more of you, after once he’d gone away from here; and then you’d be frettin’ your pretty little heart out.”“Then you won’t tell Brother William?”“Well, I won’t.”“Nor yet speak to Mr Arthur?”“Not this time, my dear; but if I see any more of it, I shall go straight over to William Cressy, and then he’ll do what seems best in his own eyes.”“I think it would be far more creditable of you, gardener, if you were attending to your vines, instead of wasting your time gossiping with the maids,” said a stern sharp voice. “And as for you, Fanny, I think you have enough to do indoors.”“If you please, ma’am, you are not my mistress,” said the girl pertly.“No, Fanny, and never shall be; but your mistress is too much taken up with her cares to note your negligence, therefore I speak. Now go!”A sharp answer was upon Fanny’s lips; but she checked it, and flounced out of the vinery, leaving Aunt Sophia with the gardener.“I am surprised at you, John Monnick,” continued the old lady. “Your master is helpless now, and you take advantage of it.”“No, ma’am, no,” said the old fellow, who would not bring the question of Fanny’s delinquency into his defence. “I’m working as steadily as I can.”“Humph!” ejaculated Aunt Sophia. “I never saw these vines so wild before.”“Well, they are behind, ma’am; but you see this is all extry. Sir James always done the vines himself, besides nearly all the other glass-work; and the things do run away from me a bit.”“Yes, if you encourage the maid-servants to come and talk.”“Yes, ma’am; shan’t occur again,” said the old fellow grimly; and he went on busily snapping out the shoots, while Aunt Sophia stalked out into the garden to meet Arthur Prayle, who was walking thoughtfully up and down one of the green walks, with his hands behind him, one holding a memorandum book, the other a pencil, with which he made a note from time to time.
“Now do give me a rose, Mr Monnick; do, please.”
“Give you a rose, my dear?” said John Monnick, pausing in his task of thinning out the superabundant growth amongst the swelling grapes. “Well, I don’t like to refuse you anything, though it do seem a shame to cut the poor things, when they look so much prettier on the trees.”
“Oh, but I like to have one to wear, Mr Monnick, to pin in my breast.”
“And then, as soon as it gets a bit faded, my dear, you chucks it away.”
“O no; not if it’s a nice one, Mr Monnick. I put it in water afterwards, and let it recover.”
“Putting things in water, ’specially masters, don’t always make ’em recover, my dear,” said the old man, picking out and snapping off a few more shoots. “Hah!” he cried, after a good sniff at the bunch of succulent pieces, and then placing one acid tendrilled scrap in his mouth, twisting it up, and munching it like some ruminating animal—“smell that, my dear; there’s a scent!” and he held out the bunch to the pretty coquettish-looking maid.
“De-licious, Mr Monnick,” said the girl, taking a long sniff at the shoots. “And now you will give me a nice pretty rosebud, won’t you?”
“I allus observe,” said the old man thoughtfully, going on with his work, “that if you want something, Fanny, you calls me Mister Monnick; but if I ask you to do anything for me, or you have an order from Sir James or my lady, it’s nothing but plain John.”
“Oh, I don’t always think to call you Mr Monnick,” said the girl archly.—“But I must go now. Do give me a nice just opening bud.”
“Well, if you’ll be a good girl, and promise only to take one, I’ll give you leave to fetch your scissors and cut a Homer.”
“What! one of those nasty common-looking little dirty pinky ones?” cried the girl. “No, thank you; I want one of those.” As she spoke, she pointed to a trellis at the end of the greenhouse, over which was trailed the abundant growth of a hook-thorned climbing rose.
“What, one o’ my Ma’shal Niels?” cried the old gardener. “I should just think not. Besides,” he added with a grim smile, “yaller wouldn’t suit your complexion.”
“Now, don’t talk stuff,” cried the girl. “Yellow does suit dark people.—Do cut me one, there’s a dear good man.”
“Yes,” said the old man; “and then, next time you get washing out your bits o’ lace and things, you’ll go hanging ’em to dry on my trained plants in the sun.”
“No; I won’t. There, I promise you I’ll never do so any more.”
“Till nex’ time.—I say, Fanny, when’s Mr Arthur going back to London?”
“I don’t know,” said the girl, rather sharply. “How can I tell?”
“Oh, I thought p’r’aps he might have been telling you last night.”
“Telling me last night!” echoed the girl. “Where should he be telling me?”
“Why, down the field-walk, to be sure, when he was a-talking to you.”
“That I’m sure he wasn’t,” cried the girl, changing colour.
“Well, he was a-wagging his chin up and down and making sounds like words; and so was you, Fanny, my dear.”
“Oh, how can you say so!”
“This way,” said the old man, facing her and speaking very deliberately. “What was he saying to you?”
“I—I wasn’t—”
“Stop a moment,” said the old man. “Mr Arthur Prayle’s such a religious-spoken sort o’ gent, that I dessay he was giving you all sorts o’ good advice, and I’m sure he wouldn’t like you to tell a lie.”
“I’m not telling a lie; I’m not.—Oh, you wicked, deceitful, spying old thing!” she cried, bursting into tears. “How dare you come watching me!”
“I didn’t come watching you, my dear. I was down there with a pot, picking up the big grey slugs that come out o’ the field into the garden; for they feeds the ducks, and saves my plants as well.—Now, lookye here, my dear; you’re a very pretty girl, and it’s very nice to be talked to by a young man, I dare say. I never cared for it myself; but young women do.”
“How dare you speak to me like that!” cried the girl, flaming up.
“’Cause I’m an old man, and knows the ways o’ the world, my dear. Mr Arthur comes down the garden to me and gives me bits o’ religious instruction and advice like; but if he wants to give any to you, I think he ought to do it in the house, and give it to Martha Betts and cook at the same time.”
“It’s all a wicked story,” cried Fanny angrily; “and I won’t stop here to be insulted!”
“Don’t, my dear. But I’m going to walk over to your brother William’s to-night, and have a bit o’ chat with him ’bout things in general, and I thought I’d give him my opinion on the pynte.”
Fanny had reached the door of the vinery; but these words stopped her short, and she came back with her face changing from red to white and back again. “You are going to tell my brother William?”
“Yes, my dear, as is right and proper too. Sir James aren’t fit to be talked to; and it’s a thing as I couldn’t say to her ladyship. It aren’t in the doctor’s way; and if I was to so much as hint at it to Miss Raleigh, she’d snap my head off, and then send you home.”
Fanny stood staring mutely with her lips apart at the old gardener, who went on deliberately snapping out the shoots, and staring up at the roof with his head amongst the vines. One moment her eyes flashed; the next they softened and the tears brimmed in them. She made a movement towards the old man where he sat perched upon his steps calmly ruminating with his mouth full of acid shoots; then, in a fit of indignation, she shrank back, but ended by going close up to him and laying her hand upon his arm.
“Leave that now,” she said.
“Nay, nay, my lass; I’ve no time to spare. Here’s all these shoots running away with the jushe and strength as ought to go into the grapes; and the master never touches them now. It all falls upon my shoulders since he’s ill.”
“Yes, yes; you work very hard; but I want to talk to you a minute.”
“Well; there then,” he said. “Now, what is it?” and he left off his task to select a nice fresh tendril to munch.
“You—you won’t tell Brother William.”
“Ay, but I shall, lass. Why, what do it matter to you, if it was all a lie and you warn’t there?”
“But William will think it was me, Mr Monnick; and he issoparticular; and—There, I’ll confess it, was me.”
“Thankye,” said the old man, with a grim smile; “but my eyes are not had enough to make a mistake.”
“But you won’t tell William?”
“It aren’t pleasant for you, my dear; but you’ll thank me for it some day.”
“But it would make such trouble. William would come over and see Mr Prayle; and you know how violent my brother can be. There’s plenty of trouble in the house without that.”
“I don’t know as William Cressy would be violent, my dear. He’s a very fine young fellow, and as good a judge o’ gardening as he be of his farm. He be very proud of his sister: and he said to me one day—”
“William said—to you?”
“Yes, my dear, to me, over a quiet pipe, as he had along o’ me one evening in my tool-house. ‘John Monnick,’ he says, ‘our Fanny’s as pretty a little lass as ever stepped, and some day she’ll be having a chap.’”
“Having a chip!” said Fanny, with her lip curling in disgust.
“‘And that’s all right and proper, if he’s a good sort; but I’m not going to have her take up with anybody, and I’m not going to have her fooled.’”
“I wish William would mind his own business,” cried Fanny, stamping her foot. “He’s got a deal to talk about; coming and staring at a stupid housemaid.”
“Martha Betts aren’t stupid, my dear, and a housemaid’s is a very honourable situation. The first woman as ever lived in a house must have been a housemaid, just the same as the first man was a gardener. Don’t you sneer at lowly occupations. Everything as is honest is good.”
“Oh, yes, of course. But you won’t tell William?”
“I feel, my dear, as if I must,” said the old man, taking the girl’s hand, and patting it softly. “You’re a very pretty little lass, and it’s quite right that you should have a sweetheart.”
“Sweetheart, indeed!” cried Fanny in disgust,
“But that there Mr Arthur aren’t the right sort.”
“How do you know?” cried the girl defiantly.
“’Cause I’m an old man as has seen a deal of the world, my dear, and I’ve got a granddaughter just like you. I shouldn’t have thought it of Mr Arthur, and I don’t know as I shan’t speak to him about it myself.”
“Oh no, no!” cried the girl excitedly. “Pray, don’t do that.”
The old man loosed her hand to sit gazing thoughtfully before him, while the girl once more grasped his arm.
“There’s on’y one thing as would make me say I wouldn’t speak to William Cressy and Mr Arthur.”
“And what’s that?” cried the girl.
“You a-giving of me your solemn promise as you won’t let Mr Arthur talk to you again.”
“I’ll promise,” cried the girl. “Yes,” said the old man; “it’s easy enough to promise; but will you keep it?”
“Yes, yes, that I will.”
“You see he’s a gentleman, and you’re only a farmer’s daughter, my dear; and he wouldn’t think no more of you, after once he’d gone away from here; and then you’d be frettin’ your pretty little heart out.”
“Then you won’t tell Brother William?”
“Well, I won’t.”
“Nor yet speak to Mr Arthur?”
“Not this time, my dear; but if I see any more of it, I shall go straight over to William Cressy, and then he’ll do what seems best in his own eyes.”
“I think it would be far more creditable of you, gardener, if you were attending to your vines, instead of wasting your time gossiping with the maids,” said a stern sharp voice. “And as for you, Fanny, I think you have enough to do indoors.”
“If you please, ma’am, you are not my mistress,” said the girl pertly.
“No, Fanny, and never shall be; but your mistress is too much taken up with her cares to note your negligence, therefore I speak. Now go!”
A sharp answer was upon Fanny’s lips; but she checked it, and flounced out of the vinery, leaving Aunt Sophia with the gardener.
“I am surprised at you, John Monnick,” continued the old lady. “Your master is helpless now, and you take advantage of it.”
“No, ma’am, no,” said the old fellow, who would not bring the question of Fanny’s delinquency into his defence. “I’m working as steadily as I can.”
“Humph!” ejaculated Aunt Sophia. “I never saw these vines so wild before.”
“Well, they are behind, ma’am; but you see this is all extry. Sir James always done the vines himself, besides nearly all the other glass-work; and the things do run away from me a bit.”
“Yes, if you encourage the maid-servants to come and talk.”
“Yes, ma’am; shan’t occur again,” said the old fellow grimly; and he went on busily snapping out the shoots, while Aunt Sophia stalked out into the garden to meet Arthur Prayle, who was walking thoughtfully up and down one of the green walks, with his hands behind him, one holding a memorandum book, the other a pencil, with which he made a note from time to time.
Volume Two—Chapter Nine.The Consequence of Killing Slugs.Poor James Scarlett’s garden was in fair condition, but far from being at its best. It was well attended to, but the guiding spirit was to some extent absent; and as Jack Scales walked down it one soft moist morning, feeling in anything but good spirits at the ill success that had attended his efforts, he began to think a good deal about quaint, acid-voiced Aunt Sophia, with her sharp manner, disposition to snub, and general harshness to those around.“Poor old girl!” he said. “She has settled herself down here, where I believe she does not want to stay; and I know it is to play propriety, and for the benefit of her nephew. It was too bad to speak to her as I did, but I was out of temper with her fidgeting about me. Let me see; what did I call her? a vexatious, meddling old maid. Poor old girl! How it does seem to sting a woman of that kind. Old maid. Too bad. I suppose the woman never existed yet who did not in her early days wish to wed. They all swear they never did, and that if the opportunity had come, they would have refused it with scorn; but human nature’s human nature, especially female human nature; and it’s woman’s vocation in life to marry, be a mother, and bring up her young to replenish the earth. If it is not, I’ve never studied humanity in sickness and in health. Oh, it’s plain enough,” he went on; “there are all the natural yearnings in her youth for one to love; and the tender affection, patience, and intense passion for her young, for whom she will work and starve and die, are all in her, like so many seeds waiting to shoot and bring forth flowers—beautiful flowers. But, as it too often happens, those flowers never blossom, for the seeds have no chance to grow; and the consequence of this unnatural life is that, a woman grows up soured—disappointed—withered as it were. Often enough she is ignorant of the unnatural state of her life, but it is unnatural all the same. Then we have the acid ways, the sharp disappointed looks, the effects, in short, of the withering up of all their beautiful God-given yearnings for that most sublime of nature’s gifts—motherhood; and we thoughtless fools sneer at unmarried women, and call them old maids. Hah!” he ejaculated; “it’s too bad. I’ll beg the old lady’s pardon the first time we meet.”Jack Scales’s meeting with Aunt Sophia came sooner than he expected, for, turning down one of the walks, he heard a rustling noise before him, and directly after a grim smile crossed his face as he saw, a short distance in front, the figure of Aunt Sophia, while at her feet were a pair of gardening gloves, and a basket filled with the weeds and dead leaves that she had been gathering.“Why, what the dickens is she about?” said the doctor. “Why—ha-ha-ha! But it isn’t a bad dodge after all.” For as he watched, he could see that Aunt Sophia was busy at work with an implement evidently of her own invention. She had a handkerchief tied over her head and beneath her chin, to keep her cap from blowing off or falling forward when she stooped, and in her hands a pair of the light lancewood wands used in playing the game of “Les Graces;” but they were firmly bound to a large pair of old scissors, turning them as it were into very long-handled shears. With these she poked and rustled about among the plants till she routed out some good fat slug, which she instantly scissored in three pieces, and then closing the shears, used their point to rake a little hole in the ground near the foot of the plant and bury the slug therein.“That’s not a bad plan, Miss Raleigh,” said the doctor as the lady looked up sharply. “The slug has fattened himself upon the tender leaves of the plant and grown to his present size; now you offer him up as a sacrifice, and bury him where he will fertilise the plant in return.”“Of course,” said Aunt Sophia shortly. “You would not leave the nasty slimy thing on the top, would you?”“Certainly not,” said the doctor. “And besides, you give the plant back, about those wonderful imbibers—its roots—the concentrated essence of all that it has lost, in the shape of slug.”“Is this meant for a joke, Doctor Scales?”“Not in the least, my dear madam. By the way, though, our friend Mr Arthur Prayle would give us a lecture on cruelty, if he saw us rejoicing over the death of our molluscous enemies here.”“Mr Arthur Prayle had better mind his accounts,” said the lady shortly; “he knows nothing about gardening.”“No; I do not think he does,” said the doctor, as the old lady routed out another slug, cut it in three, and buried it viciously—just as if she were operating on Arthur Prayle.“It seems to amuse you,” said Aunt Sophia.“Amuse me? Well, it does look rather droll,” replied the doctor; “but it can’t be pleasant for the slugs.”“Then the slugs had better emigrate,” said Aunt Sophia sharply. “I don’t want to see my poor nephew’s garden go to rack and ruin.”Doctor Scales went off as Aunt Sophia resumed her task, and, as was often his habit, began to work out a discourse upon what he had seen. Starting with the text, “Is it cruel to kill slugs,” and it was somewhat after this fashion that he mused: “Is it cruel to kill slugs? Just stand with upraised foot before one of those slimy, moist, elongated bags of concentrated cabbage, cauliflower, choice plant, and tender cucumber, and answer that question if you can.“Now, letting slimy slugs alone, and speaking as a humble-minded individual whose profession it is to save life, I want to know whether it is cruel to kill the myriad of teeming creatures that throng this earth. With sportsmen I have nothing to do. I speak from a simple horticultural point of view, and want to know whether I am justified in destroying life. To begin with, I am a teeming creature on the surface of the earth and I don’t want anybody to kill me. It would be far from pleasant to my feelings to be cut in two with a spade; to be crushed into an unpleasant mass by a broad foot; to be salted till I writhed and melted away; to be shot at with guns; caught in traps; killed with lime besprinkled upon me quick: or poisoned with deadly drugs. Yet I openly confess that I have been guilty of all these crimes. I might, in fact, have called this ‘The Recollections of a Murderer,’ so bestained are my hands in innocent blood of red and green and other colours. Certainly I might do the dirty work in a vicarious way by bringing into the garden a very serious-looking young drake, who makes no more ado about swallowing great earthworms by the yard than he does of devouring slugs by the quart, but that is a sneaking, underhanded way that I do not approve. I should feel like a Venetian noble who has hired a bravo to use his stiletto upon some obnoxious friend; and besides, if I did, the shadow of those murders would come like Banquo’s ghost to sit at my table when the aforesaid serious-looking young drake and a brother graced the board in company with a goodly dish of green peas, and seemed to murmur of the slugs and worms he had slain at my command. And there it is again—wholesale murder. I was guilty vicariously of the death of those ducks; I slew the sparrows who came to eat the peas; and, to go further, did I not kill the peas?“Who says no? The peas were alive. I plucked their pods, tearing the graceful vines to pieces limb by limb, and the pea plants died—killed—murdered. Certainly I planted them and saved their lives when they were tender, sprouting, infantile pea-lings by killing the invading slugs with salt and soot, but, though I murdered that they might live, there was no reason why I should slay them when mature. But it is so all through man’s career, he walks his ground—his little Eden—a very Cain. Say he conquers that terrible disinclination to follow the example of the old man Adam, and till the ground with a spade, a genial kind of toil that opens the pores of the skin, increases the appetite with the smell of the newly-turned earth, and gives such an awful aching pain in the back that a quarter of an hour’s usance is quite sufficient digging for any but an extremely greedy man who possesses an enormous digestion. I repeat, say he conquers his aversion to manual toil, he has not inserted the deadly blade eight inches, and turned up the ‘spit,’ as the gardeners call it, before he finds that he has chopped some wretched wriggling worm in two. The worm had no business to be there when he was digging. Why not? What does the worm know about human rights? His name is not Macgregor, and he has no feet to be upon his native heath, but he was in his native soil. He was born there, and had gone on pleasantly boring his way through life, coming up to the surface as soon as it was dark, and lying out on the cool, dewy, fragrant earth, and then you, because you want potatoes, or peas, or some other vegetable for your gluttonous maw, come and cut him in two. A judge in a court of law would go against the worm, and call it justifiable vermicide, as he was a trespasser, you legally holding the land, but that worm’s blood would still be upon your—spade.“There is no begging the question; if you garden you must kill wholesale. There is only one alternative. You can throw the big nuisances over into your neighbour’s plot, but it is only a temporary palliation, for he is sure not to like it, and certain to throw them back. Besides, you may have some compunction in the matter, and as the small nuisances cannot be thrown over, one kills and slays wholesale. It is terrible to think of! Intentionally and unintentionally one slays millions of creatures a year, beginning with one’s beef, and going down to the tiniest aphis that one treads upon in one’s daily walk, so that if it is wicked to kill slugs, it must be equally unjust to slay the tiniest fly. Why it is quite appalling, this reckoning up of crime. Those calceolarias were covered with lovely little green-flies right up the blossom stalks, and without compunction there was a massacre of the insects with tobacco water. That croquet lawn was infested with great worms, and they were watered with solution of copperas to crawl out and die. The great shelled snails that made a raid by regiments upon the strawberry beds were supplied with pillars of salt. The birds after much forbearance, were condemned to death for stealing cherries and black and red currants and gooseberries; so were the rabbits for nibbling off the tops of the tender broccoli and Brussels sprout plants. As a romantic young lady would say, this garden has been literally stained with gore, but the gore does not show, and the garden is the more abundant and green for the removal of its plagues.“Yes, there is the creephole left that the killing may be looked upon as in defence of one’s own. The worm may be indigenous, but the birds and flies invade the place, while the slugs, snails, and rodents come in through fence and wall. They attack one’s cherished plants, and, granting that those plants have life, why should they not be protected, as one’s poultry is from foxes, and their young from predatory cats? Naturalists grant plants to possess life, circulation, sleep, functions, and nerves; they grow, they blossom, they have young; they have endless contrivances for sending those young emigrating to a distance where they can get a living for themselves, and not bother and eat the nutriment of the old folks, who are, perhaps, in pinched circumstances. Some send their offspring flying upon little parachutes of their own; some artfully stick them upon the backs or sides of any animal who passes by; there is one great balsam which sits on a sunny day apparently taking aim with its little seeds, and shooting them out with a loud pop to a considerable distance; some youngsters really possess locomotion, and contract and expand in quite a crawling way till they get to some distance from the parent stem; others, again, take advantage of the first rain flood, and these little ones are off to sea, merrily sailing along hundreds of yards from where they were born. Why, even in the wood, at the bottom of the garden, there is one umbelliferous plant, a kind of wild parsnip—‘hog weed,’ as it is locally called—which grows up in a summer nine and ten feet high, carrying a host of children upon its head like a Covent Garden porter with a basket, till it thinks they are big enough to take care of themselves, when it calmly lies down, and tilts the little seeds off three or four yards away from its roots to form an independent nursery.“I cannot solve the problem whether it is cruel to slay slugs, but take refuge in the protection theory, and so, as in duty bound, we go on killing and slaying, setting traps of sugared water for the wasps that love the plums, picking off the crawling caterpillars, before they have time to bloom into butterflies, drowning aphides with syringe storms, enlisting toads to kill the wood-lice and beetles, and full of remorse for what we do, go on in our wicked ways. To take a step outside one’s garden, though, and gaze in thought around this teeming earth, what a vast scheme of preying destruction and bursting forth into new life is always going on. Those words,destructionandcruelty, might almost be expunged as being absurd in their broadest sense, for, in spite of the sore problem, it seems that from man downward to the tiniest microscopic organism, the great aim of existence is an exemplification of the verb ‘to prey.’”Jack Scales in his musings had been pretty well round the garden, and had returned to where Aunt Sophia was still killing slugs.She looked up as he approached and seemed about to speak, so he resolved to give her the opportunity, and going up he said with a smile, “Do you know Miss Raleigh, I have been musing on killing slugs, and I think yours is a very notable employment.”“Humph!” ejaculated the old lady, stopping short, and looking the doctor full in the face.—“And now, doctor, a word with you as a gentleman. You are here in constant attendance upon my nephew. He has a good deal of property and that sort of thing, but I don’t think it ought to be wasted.”“Of course not, my dear madam.”“Are you doing James any good?”The doctor opened his eyes a little more widely at this, and then said: “Well, that is a very plain question, Miss Raleigh; but I’ll give you a plain answer—So far, none.”“Then why do you stay, putting him to expense? You know the other doctors say it is a case for years of patient waiting.”“Hang the other doctors, ma’am!” cried Scales. “I do not go by what they say. I think differently, and have faith in being able to alter the condition of things.”Miss Raleigh shook her head.“Ah, but I have, madam; and I shall go on trying till my poor friend sends me away.—And now, Miss Raleigh, before I go any further, I want to apologise to you.”“Apologise! To me?”“Yes, to you. I made use of a very common but unkindly expression towards you, yesterday. Perhaps you have forgotten it.”Aunt Sophia looked at him searchingly; and there he saw the look of pain that had softened her countenance on the previous day come back, and her eyes filled with tears, as she said quietly: “I never forget these things.”“But you will forgive them. Believe me, I am very sorry, and I regret it extremely. I was worried and disappointed at the time.”“You only called me an old maid,” said Aunt Sophia, with a smile full of sadness softening the harsh lines of her face.“And I ought to have been ashamed of myself. It was the act of some thoughtless boy. Forgive me;” and he held out his hand.Aunt Sophia gazed at him thoughtfully for a few moments, and then placed her hand in his. “Let it go,” she said softly. “I shall never think of it again.”Jack Scales raised the hand to his lips, and had just let it fail, when he became aware of the fact that Arthur Prayle was walking along one of the neighbouring paths, apparently deep in the study of some book. “Confound him! he’ll misinterpret that,” said the doctor to himself; and then he saw that his companion’s eyes were fixed upon him inquiringly.“You were thinking that Mr Prayle will make remarks,” she said softly.“Let him. What is it to me what he thinks?”“No; it does not matter,” said Aunt Sophia. “Let us go down here.” She led the way along the walk to where the iron gate opened upon the meadows, across which lay the lane leading to the little ivy-grown church; and, wondering at her action, Jack Scales walked by her side.“Surely,” he thought, “she does not imagine that—Oh, absurd!” He glanced sidewise, and then, man of the world as he was, he could not help a slight sensation of uneasy confusion coming over him as he noticed that Aunt Sophia seemed to have divined his thoughts, and to be reading him through and through.“This is a pretty place,” she said, breaking a rather awkward silence.“As pretty a place as I ever saw,” replied the doctor, jumping at the opportunity of speaking on a fresh subject.“It is much altered since I knew it as a child. James has done so much to improve it since he has been master.”“You knew it well, when you were young, then?”“O yes; we lived at the next house, higher up the river,” said Aunt Sophia softly; and there was a dreamy look in her eyes, while a pleasant smile, rarely enough seen, played about her lips as she spoke. “I was child, girl, and grew to middle age down here, Doctor Scales; I come back to the place, the grey, withered, old woman you see.”“What an idiot I am!” thought the doctor. “I shall never understand her.”They were walking on across the meadows, at the end of which was a gate, at which Aunt Sophia paused. “Will you give me your hand?” she said quietly. “I am not so active as I was.”“I really don’t understand her!” muttered the doctor, climbing the gate, which was nailed up, and then assisting the old lady over. It was an easy task, for in spite of her self-disparagement, Aunt Sophia’s spareness made her very active, and, just holding by the doctor’s hands for steadiness, she jumped lightly down and stood beside him in the lane.“Shall we go down to the river and round back to the house by the path?”“No,” said Aunt Sophia quietly. “I want to go as far as the church.”Jack Scales wondered more and more as they walked on along the shadowy lane to where the little ivy-covered church stood, with its ancient wall and lychgate, stones, and wood memorials sinking sidewise into the earth, and a general aspect everywhere of calm moss-grown decay.“Hah!” exclaimed the doctor, as he stood gazing at the lichen-covered stones, and the lights and shadows thrown upon the ruddy-tiled mossy roof. “I wish I were an artist. What a place to paint!”“Yes,” said Aunt Sophia, standing with her hands clasped, gazing in a rapt dreamy way before her; “it is a beautiful old place.” She moved to the gate, and held it open for him to pass through as well, pausing while he stopped to examine a wonderfully old yew-tree, about which a rough oaken seat had been placed, one that had been cut and marked by generations with initials. Then, as he turned, she went on again to the old south porch with its seat on either side, and through it into the church, which struck cool and moist as the doctor entered, taking off his hat and gazing about impressed by its ancient quaintness.“I ought to have come before,” he said. “How old and calm everything seems! What a place for a man to be buried in, when the lifework’s done!”“And the fight, and strife, and turmoil at an end,” said Aunt Sophia, in a low sweet voice, that made the doctor start, for it did not seem like hers.Aunt Sophia went on along the little aisle with its few old pews on either side, and past the worm-eaten altar screen, beyond which were some venerable stalls, in one of which she sat down, motioning her companion to another at her side.He took the seat, and the strangely solemn calm of the place impressed him as he noted the well-worn pavement, composed of the memorial stones of the passed away, dyed in many hues by the sunlight that streamed through the old east window. Before him were the remains of a brass relating to the founder of the church; beyond that were more of the old worm-eaten stalls, in which, in bygone days, the monks of the neighbouring priory must have sat, long enough before the huge linden that had grown to maturity, and now dappled the sunbeams that fell upon the floor, had been planted where it stood, at the chancel end.As the doctor looked along the aisle with its soft dim light, the sunshine that streamed in through the southern windows and the light that came from the open door seemed to cut into the faint gloom, and mark out for themselves a place; while clearly heard from without came the twittering of swallows that circled about the little low tower, the chirping of sparrows in the ivy, and the clear trill of a lark somewhere poised in air hard by.“I shall end by being a lover of the country, and coming here to live, Miss Raleigh,” said Scales at last, breaking the solemn silence, for his companion had not spoken since she took her place within the chancel.“Not to fire from trouble?” she said with a smile.“No,” he replied; “not to flee from trouble. But there is such a sweet sense of tranquillity here, that one seems to feel at rest, and the ordinary cares of life are forgotten.—Hark!” he said, as the note of the lark grew louder and clearer in the ringing arch of heaven. And then he sat back, listening for a time, wondering at last why his companion had brought him there. Then he fell to glancing casually at the two or three tablets on the wall. One was to the memory of a former vicar; another told of the virtues of the Squire of a neighbouring Hall, who had gone to his account followed by the prayers and blessings of the whole district—so the tablet seemed to say. Lastly, his eyes lighted upon a simple square marble tablet, raised upon another of black, and read the inscription: “To the Memory of Charles Hartly, Lieutenant of Her Majesty’s —th Regiment of Foot, who fell at Delhi, when bringing in a wounded comrade lying in front of the enemy’s lines.”“Forty years ago,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “Poor fellow! he died a hero’s death.”“He was to have been my husband,” said Aunt Sophia in a low sweet voice, “had he but lived. Forty years ago! Is it so long?”Jack Scales was a man pretty well inured to trouble. He had seen grief in many phases, and his sympathies to some extent were dulled; but as he heard those calmly uttered words, and saw the old face that was raised half reverently towards the tablet upon the wall, there was a something seemed to catch his breath, and the white marble grew dim and blurred, as did the softened face that was by his side; and as Aunt Sophia rose, he once more raised her hand to his lips and kissed it, the look he gave her asking forgiveness, which was accorded with a smile.As they walked slowly back, the doctor’s manner towards his companion was entirely changed. He felt that here was a woman whom a man might be proud to call friend; and when they reached the gate leading into the meadows, and she turned to him with a smile, and said to him, “And how is Lady Martlett?” he started slightly, and then uttered a sigh of relief.“Hah!” he exclaimed. “You still take an interest in that?”“O yes, doctor,” she said. “I have from the beginning. Well, is it to be a match?”“No, no. I’ll be frank with you. I like the woman—well, I love her as well as a man should one whom he would make his wife; but it is impossible.”“Indeed!”“Yes; impossible,” he said gloomily; “even if she were not playing with me.”“I don’t think she is, doctor—not if I understand anything about women. Her pride is assumed, on account of your off-hand way to her. Why, you jeer and laugh at her. I have seen you insult her.”“Well, yes, I have. What else could I do? She wanted to bring me to her feet, to make me her slave, and to throw me over, as she has served a dozen more.”“Fops and fortune-hunters.”“Yes, that’s it,” he said excitedly, and quite carried out of his ordinary mood; “fortune-hunters. She thinks me one of that despicable brood. Hang it all, Miss Raleigh! it is out of the question.”“Why?”“Why, my dear madam? Now come. You know me pretty well by this time. Do you think I’d go hanging after such a woman for the sake of her money, and be the miserable reptile who married her for that?”“No; I think you like her for herself alone.”“I wish she hadn’t a penny; and then again, if she hadn’t, I couldn’t marry her.”“Indeed?”“Now, how could I drag such a woman down from a life of refinement and luxury, to be the wife of a poor doctor? No, madam; it is all a dream. We shall go on, sneering on her part, laughing and defiant on mine, and, I believe, all the time with sore hearts hidden beneath it all. There, you have my secret out bare before you. Now, you can laugh at the misogynist of a doctor, and think as little of him as you like.”“Yes,” said Aunt Sophia, laying her hand upon his arm softly, and looking almost tenderly in his face, “you are a strange couple.—And now,” she continued, “tell me about my poor nephew. Tell me frankly, have you any hope of his becoming the man he was?”“Hope? Yes,” he replied gloomily; “but little more. I have done and am doing all I can; but the human frame with all its nerves is a terrible mystery, in whose darkness one moves with awe.”“Then you give him up?”“Give him up!” said Scales, with a short laugh—“give him up? Miss Raleigh; you don’t know me yet. I’ll never give him up. He’s my study—the study of my life, and I shall fight on out of sheer obstinacy. I’ve plenty ofamour propre, and it’s touched here. I’ve learned one thing about him, and that’s my lighthouse by which I steer.”“What do you mean?”“I mean that Nature will perform the cure if cure there is to be; but Nature will not do it alone without a little guiding and calling upon at important times.”“I wish you success,” said Aunt Sophia softly, as they came once more in sight of Arthur Prayle, now seated in one of the garden-seats, still deep in his book; and as she spoke her eyes were fixed upon the reader. “I will help you, doctor, and you must help me. Now, I am going on with my gardening.” She left him, and walked straight back to her slug scissors, resuming her task as if nothing had happened, while the doctor stood looking after her.“Old maid!” he said to himself. “I called her an old maid. Good heavens! Why, the woman is a saint!”
Poor James Scarlett’s garden was in fair condition, but far from being at its best. It was well attended to, but the guiding spirit was to some extent absent; and as Jack Scales walked down it one soft moist morning, feeling in anything but good spirits at the ill success that had attended his efforts, he began to think a good deal about quaint, acid-voiced Aunt Sophia, with her sharp manner, disposition to snub, and general harshness to those around.
“Poor old girl!” he said. “She has settled herself down here, where I believe she does not want to stay; and I know it is to play propriety, and for the benefit of her nephew. It was too bad to speak to her as I did, but I was out of temper with her fidgeting about me. Let me see; what did I call her? a vexatious, meddling old maid. Poor old girl! How it does seem to sting a woman of that kind. Old maid. Too bad. I suppose the woman never existed yet who did not in her early days wish to wed. They all swear they never did, and that if the opportunity had come, they would have refused it with scorn; but human nature’s human nature, especially female human nature; and it’s woman’s vocation in life to marry, be a mother, and bring up her young to replenish the earth. If it is not, I’ve never studied humanity in sickness and in health. Oh, it’s plain enough,” he went on; “there are all the natural yearnings in her youth for one to love; and the tender affection, patience, and intense passion for her young, for whom she will work and starve and die, are all in her, like so many seeds waiting to shoot and bring forth flowers—beautiful flowers. But, as it too often happens, those flowers never blossom, for the seeds have no chance to grow; and the consequence of this unnatural life is that, a woman grows up soured—disappointed—withered as it were. Often enough she is ignorant of the unnatural state of her life, but it is unnatural all the same. Then we have the acid ways, the sharp disappointed looks, the effects, in short, of the withering up of all their beautiful God-given yearnings for that most sublime of nature’s gifts—motherhood; and we thoughtless fools sneer at unmarried women, and call them old maids. Hah!” he ejaculated; “it’s too bad. I’ll beg the old lady’s pardon the first time we meet.”
Jack Scales’s meeting with Aunt Sophia came sooner than he expected, for, turning down one of the walks, he heard a rustling noise before him, and directly after a grim smile crossed his face as he saw, a short distance in front, the figure of Aunt Sophia, while at her feet were a pair of gardening gloves, and a basket filled with the weeds and dead leaves that she had been gathering.
“Why, what the dickens is she about?” said the doctor. “Why—ha-ha-ha! But it isn’t a bad dodge after all.” For as he watched, he could see that Aunt Sophia was busy at work with an implement evidently of her own invention. She had a handkerchief tied over her head and beneath her chin, to keep her cap from blowing off or falling forward when she stooped, and in her hands a pair of the light lancewood wands used in playing the game of “Les Graces;” but they were firmly bound to a large pair of old scissors, turning them as it were into very long-handled shears. With these she poked and rustled about among the plants till she routed out some good fat slug, which she instantly scissored in three pieces, and then closing the shears, used their point to rake a little hole in the ground near the foot of the plant and bury the slug therein.
“That’s not a bad plan, Miss Raleigh,” said the doctor as the lady looked up sharply. “The slug has fattened himself upon the tender leaves of the plant and grown to his present size; now you offer him up as a sacrifice, and bury him where he will fertilise the plant in return.”
“Of course,” said Aunt Sophia shortly. “You would not leave the nasty slimy thing on the top, would you?”
“Certainly not,” said the doctor. “And besides, you give the plant back, about those wonderful imbibers—its roots—the concentrated essence of all that it has lost, in the shape of slug.”
“Is this meant for a joke, Doctor Scales?”
“Not in the least, my dear madam. By the way, though, our friend Mr Arthur Prayle would give us a lecture on cruelty, if he saw us rejoicing over the death of our molluscous enemies here.”
“Mr Arthur Prayle had better mind his accounts,” said the lady shortly; “he knows nothing about gardening.”
“No; I do not think he does,” said the doctor, as the old lady routed out another slug, cut it in three, and buried it viciously—just as if she were operating on Arthur Prayle.
“It seems to amuse you,” said Aunt Sophia.
“Amuse me? Well, it does look rather droll,” replied the doctor; “but it can’t be pleasant for the slugs.”
“Then the slugs had better emigrate,” said Aunt Sophia sharply. “I don’t want to see my poor nephew’s garden go to rack and ruin.”
Doctor Scales went off as Aunt Sophia resumed her task, and, as was often his habit, began to work out a discourse upon what he had seen. Starting with the text, “Is it cruel to kill slugs,” and it was somewhat after this fashion that he mused: “Is it cruel to kill slugs? Just stand with upraised foot before one of those slimy, moist, elongated bags of concentrated cabbage, cauliflower, choice plant, and tender cucumber, and answer that question if you can.
“Now, letting slimy slugs alone, and speaking as a humble-minded individual whose profession it is to save life, I want to know whether it is cruel to kill the myriad of teeming creatures that throng this earth. With sportsmen I have nothing to do. I speak from a simple horticultural point of view, and want to know whether I am justified in destroying life. To begin with, I am a teeming creature on the surface of the earth and I don’t want anybody to kill me. It would be far from pleasant to my feelings to be cut in two with a spade; to be crushed into an unpleasant mass by a broad foot; to be salted till I writhed and melted away; to be shot at with guns; caught in traps; killed with lime besprinkled upon me quick: or poisoned with deadly drugs. Yet I openly confess that I have been guilty of all these crimes. I might, in fact, have called this ‘The Recollections of a Murderer,’ so bestained are my hands in innocent blood of red and green and other colours. Certainly I might do the dirty work in a vicarious way by bringing into the garden a very serious-looking young drake, who makes no more ado about swallowing great earthworms by the yard than he does of devouring slugs by the quart, but that is a sneaking, underhanded way that I do not approve. I should feel like a Venetian noble who has hired a bravo to use his stiletto upon some obnoxious friend; and besides, if I did, the shadow of those murders would come like Banquo’s ghost to sit at my table when the aforesaid serious-looking young drake and a brother graced the board in company with a goodly dish of green peas, and seemed to murmur of the slugs and worms he had slain at my command. And there it is again—wholesale murder. I was guilty vicariously of the death of those ducks; I slew the sparrows who came to eat the peas; and, to go further, did I not kill the peas?
“Who says no? The peas were alive. I plucked their pods, tearing the graceful vines to pieces limb by limb, and the pea plants died—killed—murdered. Certainly I planted them and saved their lives when they were tender, sprouting, infantile pea-lings by killing the invading slugs with salt and soot, but, though I murdered that they might live, there was no reason why I should slay them when mature. But it is so all through man’s career, he walks his ground—his little Eden—a very Cain. Say he conquers that terrible disinclination to follow the example of the old man Adam, and till the ground with a spade, a genial kind of toil that opens the pores of the skin, increases the appetite with the smell of the newly-turned earth, and gives such an awful aching pain in the back that a quarter of an hour’s usance is quite sufficient digging for any but an extremely greedy man who possesses an enormous digestion. I repeat, say he conquers his aversion to manual toil, he has not inserted the deadly blade eight inches, and turned up the ‘spit,’ as the gardeners call it, before he finds that he has chopped some wretched wriggling worm in two. The worm had no business to be there when he was digging. Why not? What does the worm know about human rights? His name is not Macgregor, and he has no feet to be upon his native heath, but he was in his native soil. He was born there, and had gone on pleasantly boring his way through life, coming up to the surface as soon as it was dark, and lying out on the cool, dewy, fragrant earth, and then you, because you want potatoes, or peas, or some other vegetable for your gluttonous maw, come and cut him in two. A judge in a court of law would go against the worm, and call it justifiable vermicide, as he was a trespasser, you legally holding the land, but that worm’s blood would still be upon your—spade.
“There is no begging the question; if you garden you must kill wholesale. There is only one alternative. You can throw the big nuisances over into your neighbour’s plot, but it is only a temporary palliation, for he is sure not to like it, and certain to throw them back. Besides, you may have some compunction in the matter, and as the small nuisances cannot be thrown over, one kills and slays wholesale. It is terrible to think of! Intentionally and unintentionally one slays millions of creatures a year, beginning with one’s beef, and going down to the tiniest aphis that one treads upon in one’s daily walk, so that if it is wicked to kill slugs, it must be equally unjust to slay the tiniest fly. Why it is quite appalling, this reckoning up of crime. Those calceolarias were covered with lovely little green-flies right up the blossom stalks, and without compunction there was a massacre of the insects with tobacco water. That croquet lawn was infested with great worms, and they were watered with solution of copperas to crawl out and die. The great shelled snails that made a raid by regiments upon the strawberry beds were supplied with pillars of salt. The birds after much forbearance, were condemned to death for stealing cherries and black and red currants and gooseberries; so were the rabbits for nibbling off the tops of the tender broccoli and Brussels sprout plants. As a romantic young lady would say, this garden has been literally stained with gore, but the gore does not show, and the garden is the more abundant and green for the removal of its plagues.
“Yes, there is the creephole left that the killing may be looked upon as in defence of one’s own. The worm may be indigenous, but the birds and flies invade the place, while the slugs, snails, and rodents come in through fence and wall. They attack one’s cherished plants, and, granting that those plants have life, why should they not be protected, as one’s poultry is from foxes, and their young from predatory cats? Naturalists grant plants to possess life, circulation, sleep, functions, and nerves; they grow, they blossom, they have young; they have endless contrivances for sending those young emigrating to a distance where they can get a living for themselves, and not bother and eat the nutriment of the old folks, who are, perhaps, in pinched circumstances. Some send their offspring flying upon little parachutes of their own; some artfully stick them upon the backs or sides of any animal who passes by; there is one great balsam which sits on a sunny day apparently taking aim with its little seeds, and shooting them out with a loud pop to a considerable distance; some youngsters really possess locomotion, and contract and expand in quite a crawling way till they get to some distance from the parent stem; others, again, take advantage of the first rain flood, and these little ones are off to sea, merrily sailing along hundreds of yards from where they were born. Why, even in the wood, at the bottom of the garden, there is one umbelliferous plant, a kind of wild parsnip—‘hog weed,’ as it is locally called—which grows up in a summer nine and ten feet high, carrying a host of children upon its head like a Covent Garden porter with a basket, till it thinks they are big enough to take care of themselves, when it calmly lies down, and tilts the little seeds off three or four yards away from its roots to form an independent nursery.
“I cannot solve the problem whether it is cruel to slay slugs, but take refuge in the protection theory, and so, as in duty bound, we go on killing and slaying, setting traps of sugared water for the wasps that love the plums, picking off the crawling caterpillars, before they have time to bloom into butterflies, drowning aphides with syringe storms, enlisting toads to kill the wood-lice and beetles, and full of remorse for what we do, go on in our wicked ways. To take a step outside one’s garden, though, and gaze in thought around this teeming earth, what a vast scheme of preying destruction and bursting forth into new life is always going on. Those words,destructionandcruelty, might almost be expunged as being absurd in their broadest sense, for, in spite of the sore problem, it seems that from man downward to the tiniest microscopic organism, the great aim of existence is an exemplification of the verb ‘to prey.’”
Jack Scales in his musings had been pretty well round the garden, and had returned to where Aunt Sophia was still killing slugs.
She looked up as he approached and seemed about to speak, so he resolved to give her the opportunity, and going up he said with a smile, “Do you know Miss Raleigh, I have been musing on killing slugs, and I think yours is a very notable employment.”
“Humph!” ejaculated the old lady, stopping short, and looking the doctor full in the face.—“And now, doctor, a word with you as a gentleman. You are here in constant attendance upon my nephew. He has a good deal of property and that sort of thing, but I don’t think it ought to be wasted.”
“Of course not, my dear madam.”
“Are you doing James any good?”
The doctor opened his eyes a little more widely at this, and then said: “Well, that is a very plain question, Miss Raleigh; but I’ll give you a plain answer—So far, none.”
“Then why do you stay, putting him to expense? You know the other doctors say it is a case for years of patient waiting.”
“Hang the other doctors, ma’am!” cried Scales. “I do not go by what they say. I think differently, and have faith in being able to alter the condition of things.”
Miss Raleigh shook her head.
“Ah, but I have, madam; and I shall go on trying till my poor friend sends me away.—And now, Miss Raleigh, before I go any further, I want to apologise to you.”
“Apologise! To me?”
“Yes, to you. I made use of a very common but unkindly expression towards you, yesterday. Perhaps you have forgotten it.”
Aunt Sophia looked at him searchingly; and there he saw the look of pain that had softened her countenance on the previous day come back, and her eyes filled with tears, as she said quietly: “I never forget these things.”
“But you will forgive them. Believe me, I am very sorry, and I regret it extremely. I was worried and disappointed at the time.”
“You only called me an old maid,” said Aunt Sophia, with a smile full of sadness softening the harsh lines of her face.
“And I ought to have been ashamed of myself. It was the act of some thoughtless boy. Forgive me;” and he held out his hand.
Aunt Sophia gazed at him thoughtfully for a few moments, and then placed her hand in his. “Let it go,” she said softly. “I shall never think of it again.”
Jack Scales raised the hand to his lips, and had just let it fail, when he became aware of the fact that Arthur Prayle was walking along one of the neighbouring paths, apparently deep in the study of some book. “Confound him! he’ll misinterpret that,” said the doctor to himself; and then he saw that his companion’s eyes were fixed upon him inquiringly.
“You were thinking that Mr Prayle will make remarks,” she said softly.
“Let him. What is it to me what he thinks?”
“No; it does not matter,” said Aunt Sophia. “Let us go down here.” She led the way along the walk to where the iron gate opened upon the meadows, across which lay the lane leading to the little ivy-grown church; and, wondering at her action, Jack Scales walked by her side.
“Surely,” he thought, “she does not imagine that—Oh, absurd!” He glanced sidewise, and then, man of the world as he was, he could not help a slight sensation of uneasy confusion coming over him as he noticed that Aunt Sophia seemed to have divined his thoughts, and to be reading him through and through.
“This is a pretty place,” she said, breaking a rather awkward silence.
“As pretty a place as I ever saw,” replied the doctor, jumping at the opportunity of speaking on a fresh subject.
“It is much altered since I knew it as a child. James has done so much to improve it since he has been master.”
“You knew it well, when you were young, then?”
“O yes; we lived at the next house, higher up the river,” said Aunt Sophia softly; and there was a dreamy look in her eyes, while a pleasant smile, rarely enough seen, played about her lips as she spoke. “I was child, girl, and grew to middle age down here, Doctor Scales; I come back to the place, the grey, withered, old woman you see.”
“What an idiot I am!” thought the doctor. “I shall never understand her.”
They were walking on across the meadows, at the end of which was a gate, at which Aunt Sophia paused. “Will you give me your hand?” she said quietly. “I am not so active as I was.”
“I really don’t understand her!” muttered the doctor, climbing the gate, which was nailed up, and then assisting the old lady over. It was an easy task, for in spite of her self-disparagement, Aunt Sophia’s spareness made her very active, and, just holding by the doctor’s hands for steadiness, she jumped lightly down and stood beside him in the lane.
“Shall we go down to the river and round back to the house by the path?”
“No,” said Aunt Sophia quietly. “I want to go as far as the church.”
Jack Scales wondered more and more as they walked on along the shadowy lane to where the little ivy-covered church stood, with its ancient wall and lychgate, stones, and wood memorials sinking sidewise into the earth, and a general aspect everywhere of calm moss-grown decay.
“Hah!” exclaimed the doctor, as he stood gazing at the lichen-covered stones, and the lights and shadows thrown upon the ruddy-tiled mossy roof. “I wish I were an artist. What a place to paint!”
“Yes,” said Aunt Sophia, standing with her hands clasped, gazing in a rapt dreamy way before her; “it is a beautiful old place.” She moved to the gate, and held it open for him to pass through as well, pausing while he stopped to examine a wonderfully old yew-tree, about which a rough oaken seat had been placed, one that had been cut and marked by generations with initials. Then, as he turned, she went on again to the old south porch with its seat on either side, and through it into the church, which struck cool and moist as the doctor entered, taking off his hat and gazing about impressed by its ancient quaintness.
“I ought to have come before,” he said. “How old and calm everything seems! What a place for a man to be buried in, when the lifework’s done!”
“And the fight, and strife, and turmoil at an end,” said Aunt Sophia, in a low sweet voice, that made the doctor start, for it did not seem like hers.
Aunt Sophia went on along the little aisle with its few old pews on either side, and past the worm-eaten altar screen, beyond which were some venerable stalls, in one of which she sat down, motioning her companion to another at her side.
He took the seat, and the strangely solemn calm of the place impressed him as he noted the well-worn pavement, composed of the memorial stones of the passed away, dyed in many hues by the sunlight that streamed through the old east window. Before him were the remains of a brass relating to the founder of the church; beyond that were more of the old worm-eaten stalls, in which, in bygone days, the monks of the neighbouring priory must have sat, long enough before the huge linden that had grown to maturity, and now dappled the sunbeams that fell upon the floor, had been planted where it stood, at the chancel end.
As the doctor looked along the aisle with its soft dim light, the sunshine that streamed in through the southern windows and the light that came from the open door seemed to cut into the faint gloom, and mark out for themselves a place; while clearly heard from without came the twittering of swallows that circled about the little low tower, the chirping of sparrows in the ivy, and the clear trill of a lark somewhere poised in air hard by.
“I shall end by being a lover of the country, and coming here to live, Miss Raleigh,” said Scales at last, breaking the solemn silence, for his companion had not spoken since she took her place within the chancel.
“Not to fire from trouble?” she said with a smile.
“No,” he replied; “not to flee from trouble. But there is such a sweet sense of tranquillity here, that one seems to feel at rest, and the ordinary cares of life are forgotten.—Hark!” he said, as the note of the lark grew louder and clearer in the ringing arch of heaven. And then he sat back, listening for a time, wondering at last why his companion had brought him there. Then he fell to glancing casually at the two or three tablets on the wall. One was to the memory of a former vicar; another told of the virtues of the Squire of a neighbouring Hall, who had gone to his account followed by the prayers and blessings of the whole district—so the tablet seemed to say. Lastly, his eyes lighted upon a simple square marble tablet, raised upon another of black, and read the inscription: “To the Memory of Charles Hartly, Lieutenant of Her Majesty’s —th Regiment of Foot, who fell at Delhi, when bringing in a wounded comrade lying in front of the enemy’s lines.”
“Forty years ago,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “Poor fellow! he died a hero’s death.”
“He was to have been my husband,” said Aunt Sophia in a low sweet voice, “had he but lived. Forty years ago! Is it so long?”
Jack Scales was a man pretty well inured to trouble. He had seen grief in many phases, and his sympathies to some extent were dulled; but as he heard those calmly uttered words, and saw the old face that was raised half reverently towards the tablet upon the wall, there was a something seemed to catch his breath, and the white marble grew dim and blurred, as did the softened face that was by his side; and as Aunt Sophia rose, he once more raised her hand to his lips and kissed it, the look he gave her asking forgiveness, which was accorded with a smile.
As they walked slowly back, the doctor’s manner towards his companion was entirely changed. He felt that here was a woman whom a man might be proud to call friend; and when they reached the gate leading into the meadows, and she turned to him with a smile, and said to him, “And how is Lady Martlett?” he started slightly, and then uttered a sigh of relief.
“Hah!” he exclaimed. “You still take an interest in that?”
“O yes, doctor,” she said. “I have from the beginning. Well, is it to be a match?”
“No, no. I’ll be frank with you. I like the woman—well, I love her as well as a man should one whom he would make his wife; but it is impossible.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes; impossible,” he said gloomily; “even if she were not playing with me.”
“I don’t think she is, doctor—not if I understand anything about women. Her pride is assumed, on account of your off-hand way to her. Why, you jeer and laugh at her. I have seen you insult her.”
“Well, yes, I have. What else could I do? She wanted to bring me to her feet, to make me her slave, and to throw me over, as she has served a dozen more.”
“Fops and fortune-hunters.”
“Yes, that’s it,” he said excitedly, and quite carried out of his ordinary mood; “fortune-hunters. She thinks me one of that despicable brood. Hang it all, Miss Raleigh! it is out of the question.”
“Why?”
“Why, my dear madam? Now come. You know me pretty well by this time. Do you think I’d go hanging after such a woman for the sake of her money, and be the miserable reptile who married her for that?”
“No; I think you like her for herself alone.”
“I wish she hadn’t a penny; and then again, if she hadn’t, I couldn’t marry her.”
“Indeed?”
“Now, how could I drag such a woman down from a life of refinement and luxury, to be the wife of a poor doctor? No, madam; it is all a dream. We shall go on, sneering on her part, laughing and defiant on mine, and, I believe, all the time with sore hearts hidden beneath it all. There, you have my secret out bare before you. Now, you can laugh at the misogynist of a doctor, and think as little of him as you like.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Sophia, laying her hand upon his arm softly, and looking almost tenderly in his face, “you are a strange couple.—And now,” she continued, “tell me about my poor nephew. Tell me frankly, have you any hope of his becoming the man he was?”
“Hope? Yes,” he replied gloomily; “but little more. I have done and am doing all I can; but the human frame with all its nerves is a terrible mystery, in whose darkness one moves with awe.”
“Then you give him up?”
“Give him up!” said Scales, with a short laugh—“give him up? Miss Raleigh; you don’t know me yet. I’ll never give him up. He’s my study—the study of my life, and I shall fight on out of sheer obstinacy. I’ve plenty ofamour propre, and it’s touched here. I’ve learned one thing about him, and that’s my lighthouse by which I steer.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Nature will perform the cure if cure there is to be; but Nature will not do it alone without a little guiding and calling upon at important times.”
“I wish you success,” said Aunt Sophia softly, as they came once more in sight of Arthur Prayle, now seated in one of the garden-seats, still deep in his book; and as she spoke her eyes were fixed upon the reader. “I will help you, doctor, and you must help me. Now, I am going on with my gardening.” She left him, and walked straight back to her slug scissors, resuming her task as if nothing had happened, while the doctor stood looking after her.
“Old maid!” he said to himself. “I called her an old maid. Good heavens! Why, the woman is a saint!”