Part 3

‘I was not sure for a minute whether to be glad or sorry for that, Madge. But of course it is right. What is it Othello says—or wishes? Something about love growing as years go on. That’s how it will be with us.’

‘I think so—I believe so. But you must not quote Othello. He killed his love because he had no true faith in it.’

‘But then he was a nigger, and I am not. All right. I won’t mention the gentleman again. I shall be here to-morrow.’

‘Very well. Go to Uncle Dick now and help him in my place. He has some papers to fill up, and I intended to do them to-night. He will be disappointed if they are not done.’

‘Now, there is a real good girl,’ said Philip, delighted. ‘I like you best when you are asking me to do something for you.’

* * * * *

When he entered the oak parlour, Aunt Hessy was at one side of the fire, knitting. Uncle Dick was at the other, puffing with the vigour of impatience unusually large clouds from his churchwarden, whilst he stared at a blue foolscap paper. On the table were a mass of other papers, which were tossed about as if somebody had been trying to get them into as confused a mass as possible.

‘Where’s Madge?’ he ejaculated as soon as Philip appeared. ‘You’ve kept her long enough for once in a way, Philip. I am getting into a regular passion with all these rules and restrictions.’

‘Let me fill a pipe, and I shall be ready to take Madge’s place.’

‘You!’ was the mirthfully contemptuous exclamation. ‘You don’t know anything about the things, and nobody can take her place.’

‘But she has sent me, and I’ll do my best to please you, sir,’ retorted Philip with mock humility.

‘Better let Philip do what’s wanted,’ said the dame, as she rose to leave the room; ‘Madge is not well to-night.’

Uncle Dick grumbled at the absence of his secretary, but good-naturedly resigned himself to the services of her substitute. Presently, he found that Philip was so apt in taking up his suggestions that he almost forgot Madge.

ERRATIC PENS.

The journalist has no time to pick his words or sort his sentences with care. Once he has parted company with his MS., or as it is technically termed ‘copy,’ it is, as a rule, a case of ‘what I have written, I have written;’ so that, given an easy-going ‘press-reader,’ the supplier of news is likely enough to have reason to fret and fume when he sees himself in print; deriving little consolation from knowing that slipshod writing oftentimes makes very funny reading. Assuredly it is amusing to read one morning that the authorities of Alexandria are busily engaged disaffecting that, by all accounts, already sufficiently disaffected city; and the next, to learn our Canadian cousins are discussing the possibility of the abduction of Her Most Gracious Majesty. For these items of news we may be indebted to the compositor’s maladroit intervention; but that convenient scapegoat is hardly answerable for the statement that an opera by Signor Riaci, ‘the son and nephew of the composer of that name,’ had been well received at Vienna; nor can he be held responsible for the information that a town in America rejoices in a Society ‘for the prevention of cruelty to animals with upwards of a hundred dollars in the bank;’ and that a certain event occurred on the night of the twenty-fifth of May, at about two o’clock in the morning.

It may be taken for granted that the rising School of Art is in the ascendant; it is easy to believe in an overcome toper being found ‘with a pint-pot in his hand, which he could not drink;’ but some of the statements made in the newspapers tax one’s credulity overmuch. Lenient as magistrates are towards feminine offenders, they would scarcely content themselves with fining a virago for ‘breaking her mother-in-law’s arm by weekly instalments.’ Good bats as there are in the Surrey Eleven, we must take leave to doubt that one of them scored seven hundred and twelve runs in an innings. And clever as French doctors may be, they are not so clever as a Paris correspondent makes out, when, relating the discovery of a murder in that city, he tells us that ‘the only portion of the body not entirely destroyed was the left foot; and a medical examination of the remains proved that the man had been killed by blows on the head.’

Shakspeare was wrong in supposing there was any bourne from which no traveller could return. Glorifying the doings of Nares’s band of Arctic explorers, a leader-writer said: ‘From the leader of the expedition, who occupied the crow’s-nest until he was overcome by exhaustion, to the humblest seaman who died from fatigue and cold, all have earned the rewards of heroes, and have come back laden with stores of knowledge.’ An unlucky workman overbalancing himself and tumbling from his airy perch into the street, we read: ‘The deceased was seen to pitch head foremost from the scaffold, and little hopes are entertained of his recovery.’ Perhaps the deceased might have got over it, had his doctor been as devoted as the gentleman called in to do his best for a poor hurt lad, who ‘was in frequent attendance upon him after the inquest.’ Not, it may be hoped, from the remorseful feeling actuating his professional brother into writing: ‘This is to certify that I attended Mrs S. during her last illness, and that she died in consequence thereof.’

Here is a nut for lovers of arithmetical riddles to crack at their leisure; we give it up: ‘The diamond wedding of Major-general Lennox and his wife was celebrated on Saturday, at their house in Kelvinside. The General was born in Scotland in the year 1727, and was married on the 2d of December 1882, in the city of Cawnpore, to Mademoiselle de Laval, born in 1806, who had arrived at the French settlements in India with her parents from Mauritius, when that island passed in 1810 from the hands of the French into the possession of the English. General Lennox served in India for forty-three years. He went through the Cabul wars of 1839-43; assisted at the capture of Ghuznee, Khelat, Kandahar, Cabul, Gwalior, and was present at the battle of Sobraon. With his wife and youngest daughter, he was miraculously preserved during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. General Lennox retired from the service in 1860.’ After that, there is nothing surprising in a certain baronet being ‘born in Paris in 1844, and married in 1827.’

Reporting the death of a cricketer from taking carbolic acid in mistake for black draught, an Irish newspaper said: ‘The shopman filled the draught bottle out of a carbolic acid jar, instead of that marked “Senna Mixture,” though his orders were never to do so unless under supervision.’ Anticipating the death of a whale exhibited at the inaptly named Royal Aquarium at Westminster, a London paper observed: ‘It will make excellent porpoise-skin boots.’ Relating a chase after a native robber, an Indian paper said: ‘A Bheel outlaw, fleeing for the jungle, saw his comrades captured one by one, then followed his horse and his wife, and the wretched man at last found that his only companion was his mother-in-law. He thereupon gave way to despair, and was taken by the police without further trouble.’ Noticing the meeting of a new organisation called the Grand State Defenders, a New York journal said the members were bound by a solemn oath ‘never to leave the state, except in the case of an invasion by a foreign foe.’ In each case the satiric insinuation is plain enough. Whether it is intentional or not, would require some skill at thought-reading to decide.

It is well for an English soldier to be equal to a sea-voyage; but it is not generally known that it is requisite he should be familiar with life on the ocean wave. Such is the case, however, or a journalist protesting against the Duke of Connaught’s promotion to a major-generalship, on the ground that ‘he never went to sea unless it was absolutely necessary,’ is as much out of his reckoning as the correspondent representing M. Paul Bert as telling the people of Grenoble: ‘We have enemies whom their triumph has not satiated. Their appetites command us to be watchful; and once our military education is made, and our army thoroughly organised, we shall be able to say to our foes: “Take care! _twelve hundred_ citizens are arrayed in arms before you. They are all ready; they are all united. Do not touch France!”’

The London shopkeeper’s ‘Boots sold and healed while you wait,’ is not so likely to attract customers as the more pronounced orthographical eccentricities of the Gloucestershire gardener, having ‘sallery plants for zale,’ and ready to supply all comers with kalleflour, brokaler, weentur greens, raggit jak, rottigurs cale, and sprouiting brokla. But it would be hard to resist the temptation of assisting at a dramatic entertainment lightened by the musical performances of ‘a band of amateur gentlemen;’ and still harder to refuse to take a ticket for a cricket-match, knowing ‘the entire proceeds are for the benefit of the late Isaac Johnson, who is totally unprovided for;’ but the loyal natives of the Principality were not to be persuaded into joining a proposed Welsh Land League by the suggestion that they might ‘send in their names anonymously.’

When the inhabitants of a French town complained of being disturbed by the explosion of shells, the discharge of cannon, and the rattle of small-arms at a mimic presentment of the bombardment of Plevna, the authorities sent a written notice to those concerned, informing them that for the future, Plevna must be bombarded at the point of the bayonet. The guardians of public property at Concord, Massachusetts, posted up placards offering a reward for the apprehension and conviction of persons guilty of ‘girdling’ the trees in the school-house yard, and promising the payment of a suitable reward ‘for anything of the kind that may hereafter be done to any of the trees in the streets.’ Of course, they no more meant what they said, than did the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, when, in a Report, signed by four professors, they stated that the female teachers ‘were instructed in plain cooking, had, in fact, to go through the process of cooking themselves in their turn;’ a specimen of official English upon a par with the inscription telling visitors to Kew: ‘This Gallery, containing studies from Nature, painted by her in various lands, was given in 1882 to these Gardens by Marianne Hope.’

A scientific writer asks us to believe that on placing a decapitated frog at the bottom of a vessel filled with water, the animal rises to the surface, and keeps itself there, with its head in the air; or if the frog be placed in the same vessel, under an inverted glass, filled with water, it behaves in the same manner. Some folks hold novel-reading in contempt, but it is astonishing what a deal of information may be gathered from novels. For instance, we have learned that Scylla was a dandy; that Miss Hardcastle was the heroine of Sheridan’s best comedy; that a haggis is a dish peculiar to Ireland; that it usually snows upon the Derby Day; that lilacs and violets bloom amid the hues of ripening fruit; that heather blooms on the Scottish hills in the month of May; that the drones of the hive are given to toiling overmuch; that ibis-shooting is the favourite pastime of Tyrolese sportsmen; that rising barristers shrug their shoulders under rustling silk gowns; that the Victoria Cross is won by a hundred deeds of disciplined valour; that an officer can draw half-pay after selling out; and that our best bred Englishwomen are very rarely of the same name as the men they have married. One would not care to make the acquaintance of an Olympian girl with pagan eyes full of nocturnal mysteries; or desire the company of a lady ‘only a simulacrum of femininity,’ or of a gentleman deserving to be described as a small Vesuvius tabernacling in corporalities; while a lip that owes no man anything and only bows to its maker, and a castle in the air overstepping all difficulties and all rancour, are altogether beyond appreciation or comprehension. Perhaps the ladies and gentlemen who delight in mystifying such readers as they may have, are urged to it as Balzac was. Asked to explain an abstruse passage in one of his books, he frankly owned it had no meaning at all. ‘You see,’ said he, ‘for the average reader all that is clear seems easy; and if I did not sometimes give him a complicated and meaningless sentence, he would think he knew as much as myself. But when he comes upon something he cannot comprehend, he re-reads it, puzzles over it, takes his head between his hands, and glares at it; and finding it impossible to make head or tail of it, says—“Great man, Balzac; he knows more than I do!”’

CHEWTON-ABBOT.

IN THREE CHAPTERS.—CONCLUSION.

Frank laughed at the idea of Mrs Abbot kneeling at his feet; and had not the least intention of sending Millicent’s address.

He saw little of any one for the next few days except Millicent. His poor friend Mr John Jones called several times, but each time found him absent.

‘Your master is neglecting his business,’ he said sternly to Frank’s small clerk.

‘Got something pleasanter to attend to,’ said the youth with a wink. He was a sharp lad, and able to form his own opinions.

One day towards the end of the week, Mr Jones did succeed in catching his young friend, and, moreover, in smoking the whole of a long cigar in his society. ‘Look here, Abbot,’ he said, ‘what’s up with you? Are you going to be married?’

‘Yes,’ said Frank; ‘I am.’

‘Thought so,’ said Mr Jones. ‘When?’

‘Next Tuesday,’ answered Frank as laconically as his strange friend.

‘Girl got money?’

‘No; poorer than I am.’

‘That’s bad. Tell me all about it.’

Every man in Frank’s plight likes a friend to unburden his heart to; so Mr Jones had the whole history of his love affair, from the moment his mother intervened down to the present happy time. Frank waxed so eloquent, that his friend’s eyes glistened, and when the history was finished, he grasped the young man’s hand, and wished him good wishes which were certainly heartfelt.

‘I have a favour to ask,’ he said, in a very humble way, quite different from his usual energetic style of talking. ‘I haven’t known you long, so it’s presumption on my part. But I’ve grown very fond of you. May I come to the church and see you married?’

‘You may be best-man, if you like; or you can give the bride away. It will save us having recourse to the sexton.—Only on one condition, though,’ continued Frank, struck by a sudden thought; ‘that is, you don’t go making absurd presents.’

‘I must give you something.’

‘Give me a box of cigars, then.’

‘Very well,’ said Mr Jones. ‘But you’re disgustingly proud.’

So it was settled. To Frank’s great relief—for he disliked paining the man by refusing anything—Mr Jones brought him a box of his big cigars, and on the Tuesday morning accompanied him to the quiet town church, where in due time Millicent appeared, accompanied by her distant relative. Mr John Jones acted in his twofold capacity with great decorum. Frank had laughingly told Millicent of the strange arrangement he had made. She raised no objection. ‘What does it matter,’ she said, ‘so long as we are really married?’ So, when the clergyman asked who gave this woman, &c., Mr Jones stepped forward and performed the office. When the ceremony was over, and the happy pair stepping into the carriage, thinking, no doubt, his services entitled him to some reward, he kissed the bride on her forehead—a proceeding which rather staggered Frank, although, as Millicent did not seem annoyed, he said nothing.

‘That old Jones is a strange fellow,’ he said, as Millicent and he were safely ensconced in the brougham.

‘Yes. How long have you known him?’

‘Only a week or two—quite a chance acquaintance.’

‘Chance acquaintances are not to be depended upon,’ said Mrs Frank Abbot sententiously.

Then, as was but natural, they talked of other things, and dismissed Mr John Jones from their happy minds.

During the last week, they had held many debates as to where they should spend the honeymoon. As yet, they had only partially settled the important point. By Millicent’s express wish, the first week was to be passed at Clifton. ‘Dear old Clifton!’ she said. ‘We met there first; remember that, sir!’ Frank did not particularly want to go to Clifton, but he yielded without a murmur. Whether it should be Switzerland, Italy, France, Scotland, or Ireland afterwards, was to be decided at their leisure. So the brougham drove to Paddington, and Mr and Mrs Frank Abbot took the train for the west.

They spent five happy days at Clifton; although they knew the scenery by heart, it looked more beautiful than ever under the present auspices. Then Frank began to talk about going elsewhere; but Millicent seemed in no hurry to make a move. ‘I wonder, Frank,’ she said one evening, ‘you don’t go over and have a look at your old home.’

‘I haven’t the heart to go,’ sighed Frank. ‘I might have gone by myself; but I can’t stand it with you. I shall be thinking all the while how you would have graced it.’

‘Who lives there now?’

‘A Mr Tompkinson—a London merchant.’

‘I should so like to see the place, Frank! Do take me to-morrow.’

Frank, who, in truth, was longing to have a look at the old place, consented. They decided to go the next day. ‘We will have a carriage, and drive,’ said Frank.

‘What extravagance!’ said Millicent.

‘Never mind. I shall only be married once. When our honeymoon is over, we will go in for strict economy.’

Millicent agreed to this. So a carriage was hired the next morning, and they started for Frank’s ancestral home.

It was a lovely September morning; the air was fresh and exhilarating. As soon as the dark dusty city was left behind, Millicent’s spirits rose to a mad pitch, which Frank, with all his newly married adoration, fancied was not quite in keeping with what was to him at least a sort of solemn pilgrimage. She caught hold of his hands and squeezed them, she laughed and talked; in fact, generally misconducted herself. Frank had never seen her in such a mood before. He was fain to believe that she was forcing her merriment, to show him how little she cared for the loss of the wealth she would have shared. Nevertheless, as each landmark came in sight, and at last he knew that he was passing through lands which one day should have been his, he grew gloomy, moody, and miserable. Millicent saw what passed through his mind; she sank into silence; an occasional pressure of the hand only reminding him that at least he had her.

Presently he stopped the carriage. ‘You can get the best view of the dear old house from here,’ he said.

‘Let us get out,’ said his wife.

They alighted, and for some minutes stood looking at the long gray house. Frank’s eyes were full of tears.

‘Can’t we go over the house?’ asked Millicent.

‘By permission of Mr Tompkinson, no doubt; but he is a stranger to me, so I don’t care to ask it.’

‘But I want to see the inside so much, Frank; you have described it to me so often. Let us go up and ask if we can go over it.’

The idea of asking leave to go over Chewton Hall was more than Frank could bear. ‘I would much rather not,’ he said.

‘But I want to go, Frank,’ said Millicent, pouting. ‘No one will know us, so what does it matter?’

Frank still shook his head and raised objections. If there was one thing above another he hated, it was asking favours of strangers. Chewton Hall was not a show-place. It boasted no specimens of interesting architecture; it possessed no gallery of paintings. As likely as not, when they reached the door and preferred their request, some flunky of this fellow Tompkinson’s would order them off the grounds. In short, sorry as he was to disappoint his wife, Mr Abbot firmly refused to ask leave to go over the Hall. Thereupon he discovered that he had married a young woman who had no intention of giving him abject obedience.

‘It’s very unkind of you,’ she said. ‘I _will_ go over the place. If you won’t come, I shall go alone.’ She turned away, pushed the lodge-gate open in a most unceremonious way, and was twenty yards up the drive before her husband had recovered from his surprise. At first, he resolved to leave her to her fate; but that seemed an unkind thing to do. After all, she wanted to look over his old home solely for love of him. He could not let her go alone; besides, as he was hesitating, she turned and beckoned to him. So he walked after her.

As soon as Millicent had satisfied herself that her husband was following her, she quickened her pace to such an extent, that without actually running, he could not overtake her. Arguing that a man’s running after a woman up a stranger’s carriage-drive was not a dignified preparation to asking a favour, Frank followed his wife at a reasonable pace; and when he came up to her, found her standing at the door of the Hall in conversation with an elderly woman, who was evidently a housekeeper. Frank thought this good woman eyed him very curiously and suspiciously.

‘It’s all right, Frank,’ said Millicent, turning her smiling face to him. ‘We may go over the Hall. Mr Tompkinson is not here at present.’

‘Please, walk in,’ said the housekeeper, dropping a courtesy.

Millicent did so; and Frank followed her, sulkily. He did not approve of the proceedings. As his wife had forced him to the house, he had determined to send his card up to Mr Tompkinson, trusting that his former connection with the place would excuse the liberty he was taking. But he did not like this going behind the man’s back, and felt sure that Millicent had been smoothing the way with a bribe.

‘That’s the drawing-room—the dining-room—library—billiard-room,’ said the housekeeper, jerking her finger at the doors in succession. ‘Please, walk through them; and ring when you’d like to go up-stairs and see the view.’

Therewith the woman vanished, after giving Millicent a knowing look, which Frank felt sure spoke of wholesale bribery.

‘I say, Millicent,’ said Frank, ‘we can’t go walking about a man’s house alone, in this fashion.’

‘My dear,’ said Millicent very seriously, ‘I pledged my honour we would pocket nothing.’ Then she broke into an hysterical little laugh; and Frank wondered what had come to his wife.

‘Let us go to the drawing-room first,’ she said, recovering her gravity, and opening the door pointed out by the housekeeper.

Frank passed through the doorway, and for a moment could think of nothing but how he should keep himself from quite breaking down. The room looked almost the same as when he last entered it—the same as he had known it from his earliest days. Every chair and table the same, or apparently so. Then he remembered that the purchaser of the house had also bought nearly all the household furniture. At the time, he was glad to think the old place would not be dismantled; now he regretted it had not been. The presence of the well-remembered Lares and Penates left the old home unchanged in all—save that it was no longer his home. There was the very stool on which as a boy he used to sit at his mother’s feet; there was the wonderful Japanese cabinet, with dozens of little lackered drawers, which used to be opened now and again as a great treat to him. And here was he standing in the middle of these old household gods, by permission of another man’s servant. He wished he had been firm, and not yielded to Millicent’s whim.