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Evan Harrington — Complete

by George Meredith · English · Gutenberg #4434 · 990,555 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Evan Harrington — Complete

Author: George Meredith


        
Release date: November 3, 2004 [eBook #4434]
                Most recently updated: December 20, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4434

Credits: David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EVAN HARRINGTON — COMPLETE ***




EVAN HARRINGTON

By George Meredith


CONTENTS

 CHAPTER I. ABOVE BUTTONS
 CHAPTER II. THE HERITAGE OF THE SON
 CHAPTER III. THE DAUGHTERS OF THE SHEARS
 CHAPTER IV. ON BOARD THE JOCASTA
 CHAPTER V. THE FAMILY AND THE FUNERAL
 CHAPTER VI. MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD
 CHAPTER VII. MOTHER AND SON
 CHAPTER VIII. INTRODUCES AN ECCENTRIC
 CHAPTER IX. THE COUNTESS IN LOW SOCIETY
 CHAPTER X. MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD AGAIN
 CHAPTER XI. DOINGS AT AN INN
 CHAPTER XII. IN WHICH ALE IS SHOWN TO HAVE ONE QUALITY OF WINE
 CHAPTER XIII. THE MATCH OF FALLOW FIELD AGAINST BECKLEY
 CHAPTER XIV. THE COUNTESS DESCRIBES THE FIELD OF ACTION
 CHAPTER XV. A CAPTURE
 CHAPTER XVI. LEADS TO A SMALL SKIRMISH BETWEEN ROSE AND EVAN
 CHAPTER XVII. IN WHICH EVAN WRITES HIMSELF TAILOR
 CHAPTER XVIII. IN WHICH EVAN CALLS HIMSELF GENTLEMAN
 CHAPTER XIX. SECOND DESPATCH OF THE COUNTESS
 CHAPTER XX. BREAK-NECK LEAP
 CHAPTER XXI. TRIBULATIONS AND TACTICS OF THE COUNTESS
 CHAPTER XXII. IN WHICH THE DAUGHTERS OF THE GREAT MEL HAVE TO DIGEST HIM AT DINNER
 CHAPTER XXIII. TREATS OF A HANDKERCHIEF
 CHAPTER XXIV. THE COUNTESS MAKES HERSELF FELT
 CHAPTER XXV. IN WHICH THE STREAM FLOWS MUDDY AND CLEAR
 CHAPTER XXVI. MRS. MEL MAKES A BED FOR HERSELF AND FAMILY
 CHAPTER XXVII. EXHIBITS ROSE’S GENERALSHIP; EVAN’S PERFORMANCE ON THE SECOND FIDDLE; AND THE WRETCHEDNESS OF THE COUNTESS
 CHAPTER XXVIII. TOM COGGLESEY’S PROPOSITION
 CHAPTER XXIX. PRELUDE TO AN ENGAGEMENT
 CHAPTER XXX. THE BATTLE OF THE BULL-DOGS. PART I.
 CHAPTER XXXI. THE BATTLE OF THE BULL-DOGS. PART II.
 CHAPTER XXXII. IN WHICH EVAN’S LIGHT BEGINS TO TWINKLE AGAIN
 CHAPTER XXXIII. THE HERO TAKES HIS RANK IN THE ORCHESTRA
 CHAPTER XXXIV. A PAGAN SACRIFICE
 CHAPTER XXXV. ROSE WOUNDED
 CHAPTER XXXVI. BEFORE BREAKFAST
 CHAPTER XXXVII. THE RETREAT FROM BECKLEY
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. IN WHICH WE HAVE TO SEE IN THE DARK
 CHAPTER XXXIX. IN THE DOMAIN OF TAILORDOM
 CHAPTER XL. IN WHICH THE COUNTESS STILL SCENTS GAME
 CHAPTER XLI. REVEALS AN ABOMINABLE PLOT OF THE BROTHERS COGGLESBY
 CHAPTER XLII. JULIANA
 CHAPTER XLIII. ROSE
 CHAPTER XLIV. CONTAINS A WARNING TO ALL CONSPIRATORS
 CHAPTER XLV. IN WHICH THE SHOP BECOMES THE CENTRE OF ATTRACTION
 CHAPTER XLVI. A LOVERS’ PARTING
 CHAPTER XLVII. A YEAR LATER, THE COUNTESS DE SALDAR DE SANCORVO TO HER SISTER CAROLINE




CHAPTER I.
ABOVE BUTTONS


Long after the hours when tradesmen are in the habit of commencing
business, the shutters of a certain shop in the town of
Lymport-on-the-Sea remained significantly closed, and it became known
that death had taken Mr. Melchisedec Harrington, and struck one off the
list of living tailors. The demise of a respectable member of this
class does not ordinarily create a profound sensation. He dies, and his
equals debate who is to be his successor: while the rest of them who
have come in contact with him, very probably hear nothing of his great
launch and final adieu till the winding up of cash-accounts; on which
occasions we may augur that he is not often blessed by one or other of
the two great parties who subdivide this universe. In the case of Mr.
Melchisedec it was otherwise. This had been a grand man, despite his
calling, and in the teeth of opprobrious epithets against his craft. To
be both generally blamed, and generally liked, evinces a peculiar
construction of mortal. Mr. Melchisedec, whom people in private called
the great Mel, had been at once the sad dog of Lymport, and the pride
of the town. He was a tailor, and he kept horses; he was a tailor, and
he had gallant adventures; he was a tailor, and he shook hands with his
customers. Finally, he was a tradesman, and he never was known to have
sent in a bill. Such a personage comes but once in a generation, and,
when he goes, men miss the man as well as their money.

That he was dead, there could be no doubt. Kilne, the publican
opposite, had seen Sally, one of the domestic servants, come out of the
house in the early morning and rush up the street to the doctor’s,
tossing her hands; and she, not disinclined to dilute her grief, had,
on her return, related that her master was then at his last gasp, and
had refused, in so many words, to swallow the doctor.

“‘I won’t swallow the doctor!’ he says, ‘I won’t swallow the doctor!’”
Sally moaned. “‘I never touched him,’ he says, ‘and I never will.’”

Kilne angrily declared, that in his opinion, a man who rejected
medicine in extremity, ought to have it forced down his throat: and
considering that the invalid was pretty deeply in Kilne’s debt, it
naturally assumed the form of a dishonest act on his part; but Sally
scornfully dared any one to lay hand on her master, even for his own
good. “For,” said she, “he’s got his eyes awake, though he do lie so
helpless. He marks ye!”

“Ah! ah!” Kilne sniffed the air. Sally then rushed back to her duties.

“Now, there’s a man!” Kilne stuck his hands in his pockets and began
his meditation: which, however, was cut short by the approach of his
neighbour Barnes, the butcher, to whom he confided what he had heard,
and who ejaculated professionally, “Obstinate as a pig!” As they stood
together they beheld Sally, a figure of telegraph, at one of the
windows, implying that all was just over.

“Amen!” said Barnes, as to a matter-of-fact affair.

Some minutes after, the two were joined by Grossby, the confectioner,
who listened to the news, and observed:

“Just like him! I’d have sworn he’d never take doctor’s stuff”; and,
nodding at Kilne, “liked his medicine best, eh?”

“Had a-hem!—good lot of it,” muttered Kilne, with a suddenly serious
brow.

“How does he stand on your books?” asked Barnes.

Kilne shouldered round, crying: “Who the deuce is to know?”

“I don’t,” Grossby sighed. “In he comes with his ‘Good morning,
Grossby, fine day for the hunt, Grossby,’ and a ten-pound note. ‘Have
the kindness to put that down in my favour, Grossby.’ And just as I am
going to say, ‘Look here,—this won’t do,’ he has me by the collar, and
there’s one of the regiments going to give a supper party, which he’s
to order; or the Admiral’s wife wants the receipt for that pie; or in
comes my wife, and there’s no talking of business then, though she may
have been bothering about his account all the night beforehand.
Something or other! and so we run on.”

“What I want to know,” said Barnes, the butcher, “is where he got his
tenners from?”

Kilne shook a sagacious head: “No knowing!”

“I suppose we shall get something out of the fire?” Barnes suggested.

“That depends!” answered the emphatic Kilne.

“But, you know, if the widow carries on the business,” said Grossby,
“there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get it all, eh?”

“There ain’t two that can make clothes for nothing, and make a profit
out of it,” said Kilne.

“That young chap in Portugal,” added Barnes, “he won’t take to
tailoring when he comes home. D’ye think he will?”

Kilne muttered: “Can’t say!” and Grossby, a kindly creature in his way,
albeit a creditor, reverting to the first subject of their discourse,
ejaculated, “But what a one he was!—eh?”

“Fine!—to look on,” Kilne assented.

“Well, he was like a Marquis,” said Barnes.

Here the three regarded each other, and laughed, though not loudly.
They instantly checked that unseemliness, and Kilne, as one who rises
from the depths of a calculation with the sum in his head, spoke quite
in a different voice:

“Well, what do you say, gentlemen? shall we adjourn? No use standing
here.”

By the invitation to adjourn, it was well understood by the committee
Kilne addressed, that they were invited to pass his threshold, and
partake of a morning draught. Barnes, the butcher, had no objection
whatever, and if Grossby, a man of milder make, entertained any, the
occasion and common interests to be discussed, advised him to waive
them. In single file these mourners entered the publican’s house, where
Kilne, after summoning them from behind the bar, on the important
question, what it should be? and receiving, first, perfect acquiescence
in his views as to what it should be, and then feeble suggestions of
the drink best befitting that early hour and the speaker’s particular
constitution, poured out a toothful to each, and one to himself.

“Here’s to him, poor fellow!” said Kilne; and was deliberately echoed
twice.

“Now, it wasn’t that,” Kilne pursued, pointing to the bottle in the
midst of a smacking of lips, “that wasn’t what got him into
difficulties. It was expensive luckshries. It was being above his
condition. Horses! What’s a tradesman got to do with horses? Unless
he’s retired! Then he’s a gentleman, and can do as he likes. It’s no
use trying to be a gentleman if you can’t pay for it. It always ends
bad. Why, there was he, consorting with gentlefolks—gay as a lark! Who
has to pay for it?”

Kilne’s fellow-victims maintained a rather doleful tributary silence.

“I’m not saying anything against him now,” the publican further
observed. “It’s too late. And there! I’m sorry he’s gone, for one. He
was as kind a hearted a man as ever breathed. And there! perhaps it was
just as much my fault; I couldn’t say ‘No’ to him,—dash me, if I
could!”

Lymport was a prosperous town, and in prosperity the much-despised
British tradesman is not a harsh, he is really a well-disposed, easy
soul, and requires but management, manner, occasional instalments—just
to freshen the account—and a surety that he who debits is on the spot,
to be a right royal king of credit. Only the account must never drivel.
“Stare aut crescere” appears to be his feeling on that point, and the
departed Mr. Melchisedec undoubtedly understood him there; for the
running on of the account looked deplorable and extraordinary now that
Mr. Melchisedec was no longer in a position to run on with it, and it
was precisely his doing so which had prevented it from being brought to
a summary close long before.

Both Barnes, the butcher, and Grossby, the confectioner, confessed that
they, too, found it hard ever to say “No” to him, and, speaking
broadly, never could.

“Except once,” said Barnes, “when he wanted me to let him have a ox to
roast whole out on the common, for the Battle of Waterloo. I stood out
against him on that. ‘No, no,’ says I, ‘I’ll joint him for ye, Mr.
Harrington. You shall have him in joints, and eat him at home’;—ha!
ha!”

“Just like him!” said Grossby, with true enjoyment of the princely
disposition that had dictated the patriotic order.

“Oh!—there!” Kilne emphasized, pushing out his arm across the bar, as
much as to say, that in anything of such a kind, the great Mel never
had a rival.

“That ‘Marquis’ affair changed him a bit,” said Barnes.

“Perhaps it did, for a time,” said Kilne. “What’s in the grain, you
know. He couldn’t change. He would be a gentleman, and nothing’d stop
him.”

“And I shouldn’t wonder but what that young chap out in Portugal’ll
want to be one, too; though he didn’t bid fair to be so fine a man as
his father.”

“More of a scholar,” remarked Kilne. “That I call his worst
fault—shilly-shallying about that young chap. I mean his.” Kilne
stretched a finger toward the dead man’s house. “First, the young
chap’s to be sent into the Navy; then it’s the Army; then he’s to be a
judge, and sit on criminals; then he goes out to his sister in
Portugal; and now there’s nothing but a tailor open to him, as I see,
if we’re to get our money.”

“Ah! and he hasn’t got too much spirit to work to pay his father’s
debts,” added Barnes. “There’s a business there to make any man’s
fortune—properly _di_rected, _I_ say. But, I suppose, like father like
son, he’ll becoming the Marquis, too. He went to a gentleman’s school,
and he’s had foreign training. I don’t know what to think about it. His
sisters over there—they were fine women.”

“Oh! a fine family, every one of ’em! and married well!” exclaimed the
publican.

“I never had the exact rights of that ‘Marquis’ affair,” said Grossby;
and, remembering that he had previously laughed knowingly when it was
alluded to, pursued: “Of course I heard of it at the time, but how did
he behave when he was blown upon?”

Barnes undertook to explain; but Kilne, who relished the narrative
quite as well, and was readier, said: “Look here! I’ll tell you. I had
it from his own mouth one night when he wasn’t—not quite himself. He
was coming down King William Street, where he stabled his horse, you
know, and I met him. He’d been dining out-somewhere out over
Fallowfield, I think it was; and he sings out to me, ‘Ah! Kilne, my
good fellow!’ and I, wishing to be equal with him, says, ‘A fine night,
my lord!’ and he draws himself up—he smelt of good company—says he,
‘Kilne! I’m not a lord, as you know, and you have no excuse for
mistaking me for one, sir!’ So I pretended I had mistaken him, and then
he tucked his arm under mine, and said, ‘You’re no worse than your
betters, Kilne. They took me for one at Squire Uplift’s to-night, but a
man who wishes to pass off for more than he is, Kilne, and impose upon
people, he says, ‘he’s contemptible, Kilne! contemptible!’ So that, you
know, set me thinking about ‘Bath’ and the ‘Marquis,’ and I couldn’t
help smiling to myself, and just let slip a question whether he had
enlightened them a bit. ‘Kilne,’ said he, ‘you’re an honest man, and a
neighbour, and I’ll tell you what happened. The Squire,’ he says,
‘likes my company, and I like his table. Now the Squire’d never do a
dirty action, but the Squire’s nephew, Mr. George Uplift, he can’t
forget that I earn my money, and once or twice I have had to correct
him.’ And I’ll wager Mel did it, too! Well, he goes on: ‘There was
Admiral Sir Jackson Racial and his lady, at dinner, Squire Falco of
Bursted, Lady Barrington, Admiral Combleman—our admiral, that was; “Mr.
This and That”, I forget their names—and other ladies and gentlemen
whose acquaintance I was not honoured with.’ You know his way of
talking. ‘And there was a goose on the table,’ he says; and, looking
stern at me, ‘Don’t laugh yet!’ says he, like thunder. ‘Well, he goes
on: Mr. George caught my eye across the table, and said, so as not to
be heard by his uncle, “If that bird was rampant, you would see your
own arms, Marquis.”’ And Mel replied, quietly for him to hear, “And as
that bird is couchant, Mr. George, you had better look to your sauce.”
Couchant means squatting, you know. That’s heraldry! Well, that wasn’t
bad sparring of Mel’s. But, bless you! he was never taken aback, and
the gentlefolks was glad enough to get him to sit down amongst ’em. So,
says Mr. George, ‘I know you’re a fire-eater, Marquis,’ and his dander
was up, for he began marquising Mel, and doing the mock polite at such
a rate, that, by-and-by, one of the ladies who didn’t know Mel called
him ‘my lord’ and ‘his lordship.’ ‘And,’ says Mel, ‘I merely bowed to
her, and took no notice.’ So that passed off: and there sits Mel
telling his anecdotes, as grand as a king. And, by-and-by, young Mr.
George, who hadn’t forgiven Mel, and had been pulling at the bottle
pretty well, he sings out, ‘It’s Michaelmas! the death of the goose!
and I should like to drink the Marquis’s health!’ and he drank it
solemn. But, as far as I can make out, the women part of the company
was a little in the dark. So Mel waited till there was a sort of a
pause, and then speaks rather loud to the Admiral, ‘By the way, Sir
Jackson, may I ask you, has the title of Marquis anything to do with
tailoring?’ Now Mel was a great favourite with the Admiral, and with
his lady, too, they say—and the Admiral played into his hands, you see,
and, says he, ‘I’m not aware that it has, Mr. Harrington.’ And he
begged for to know why he asked the question—called him, ‘Mister,’ you
understand. So Mel said, and I can see him now, right out from his
chest he spoke, with his head up—‘When I was a younger man, I had the
good taste to be fond of good society, and the bad taste to wish to
appear different from what I was in it’: that’s Mel speaking; everybody
was listening; so he goes on: ‘I was in the habit of going to Bath in
the season, and consorting with the gentlemen I met there on terms of
equality; and for some reason that I am quite guiltless of,’ says Mel,
‘the hotel people gave out that I was a Marquis in disguise; and, upon
my honour, ladies and gentlemen—I was young then, and a fool—I could
not help imagining I looked the thing. At all events, I took upon
myself to act the part, and with some success, and considerable
gratification; for, in my opinion,’ says Mel, ‘no real Marquis ever
enjoyed his title so much as I did. One day I was in my shop—No. 193,
Main Street, Lymport—and a gentleman came in to order his outfit. I
received his directions, when suddenly he started back, stared at me,
and exclaimed:

“My dear Marquis! I trust you will pardon me for having addressed you
with so much familiarity.” I recognized in him one of my Bath
acquaintances. That circumstance, ladies and gentlemen, has been a
lesson to me. Since that time I have never allowed a false impression
with regard to my position to exist. I desire,’ says Mel, smiling, ‘to
have my exact measure taken everywhere; and if the Michaelmas bird is
to be associated with me, I am sure I have no objection; all I can say
is, that I cannot justify it by letters patent of nobility.’ That’s how
Mel put it. Do you think they thought worse of him? I warrant you he
came out of it in flying colours. Gentlefolks like straight-forwardness
in their inferiors—that’s what they do. Ah!” said Kilne, meditatively,
“I see him now, walking across the street in the moonlight, after he’d
told me that. A fine figure of a man! and there ain’t many Marquises to
match him.”

To this Barnes and Grossby, not insensible to the merits of the recital
they had just given ear to, agreed. And with a common voice of praise
in the mouths of his creditors, the dead man’s requiem was sounded.




CHAPTER II.
THE HERITAGE OF THE SON


Toward evening, a carriage drove up to the door of the muted house, and
the card of Lady Racial, bearing a hurried line in pencil, was handed
to the widow.

It was when you looked upon her that you began to comprehend how great
was the personal splendour of the husband who could eclipse such a
woman. Mrs. Harrington was a tall and a stately dame. Dressed in the
high waists of the matrons of that period, with a light shawl drawn
close over her shoulders and bosom, she carried her head well; and her
pale firm features, with the cast of immediate affliction on them, had
much dignity: dignity of an unrelenting physical order, which need not
express any remarkable pride of spirit. The family gossips who, on both
sides, were vain of this rare couple, and would always descant on their
beauty, even when they had occasion to slander their characters, said,
to distinguish them, that Henrietta Maria had a Port, and Melchisedec a
Presence: and that the union of a Port and a Presence, and such a Port
and such a Presence, was so uncommon, that you might search England
through and you would not find another, not even in the highest ranks
of society. There lies some subtle distinction here; due to the minute
perceptions which compel the gossips of a family to coin phrases that
shall express the nicest shades of a domestic difference. By a Port,
one may understand them to indicate something unsympathetically
impressive; whereas a Presence would seem to be a thing that directs
the most affable appeal to our poor human weaknesses. His Majesty King
George IV., for instance, possessed a Port: Beau Brummel wielded a
Presence. Many, it is true, take a Presence to mean no more than a
shirt-frill, and interpret a Port as the art of walking erect. But this
is to look upon language too narrowly.

On a more intimate acquaintance with the couple, you acknowledge the
aptness of the fine distinction. By birth Mrs. Harrington had claims to
rank as a gentlewoman. That is, her father was a lawyer of Lymport. The
lawyer, however, since we must descend the genealogical tree, was known
to have married his cook, who was the lady’s mother. Now Mr.
Melchisedec was mysterious concerning his origin; and, in his cups,
talked largely and wisely of a great Welsh family, issuing from a line
of princes; and it is certain that he knew enough of their history to
have instructed them on particular points of it. He never could think
that his wife had done him any honour in espousing him; nor was she the
woman to tell him so. She had married him for love, rejecting various
suitors, Squire Uplift among them, in his favour. Subsequently she had
committed the profound connubial error of transferring her affections,
or her thoughts, from him to his business, which, indeed, was much in
want of a mate; and while he squandered the guineas, she patiently
picked up the pence. They had not lived unhappily. He was constantly
courteous to her. But to see the Port at that sordid work considerably
ruffled the Presence—put, as it were, the peculiar division between
them; and to behave toward her as the same woman who had attracted his
youthful ardours was a task for his magnificent mind, and may have
ranked with him as an indemnity for his general conduct, if his
reflections ever stretched so far. The townspeople of Lymport were
correct in saying that his wife, and his wife alone, had, as they
termed it, kept him together. Nevertheless, now that he was dead, and
could no longer be kept together, they entirely forgot their respect
for her, in the outburst of their secret admiration for the popular
man. Such is the constitution of the inhabitants of this dear Island of
Britain, so falsely accused by the Great Napoleon of being a nation of
shopkeepers. Here let any one proclaim himself Above Buttons, and act
on the assumption, his fellows with one accord hoist him on their
heads, and bear him aloft, sweating, and groaning, and cursing, but
proud of him! And if he can contrive, or has any good wife at home to
help him, to die without going to the dogs, they are, one may say,
unanimous in crying out the same eulogistic funeral oration as that
commenced by Kilne, the publican, when he was interrupted by Barnes,
the butcher, “Now, there’s a man!—”

Mrs. Harrington was sitting in her parlour with one of her married
nieces, Mrs. Fiske, and on reading Lady Racial’s card she gave word for
her to be shown up into the drawing-room. It was customary among Mrs.
Harrington’s female relatives, who one and all abused and adored the
great Mel, to attribute his shortcomings pointedly to the ladies; which
was as much as if their jealous generous hearts had said that he was
sinful, but that it was not his fault. Mrs. Fiske caught the card from
her aunt, read the superscription, and exclaimed: “The idea! At least
she might have had the decency! She never set her foot in the house
before—and right enough too! What can she want now? I decidedly would
refuse to see her, aunt!”

The widow’s reply was simply, “Don’t be a fool, Ann!”

Rising, she said: “Here, take poor Jacko, and comfort him till I come
back.”

Jacko was a middle-sized South American monkey, and had been a pet of
her husband’s. He was supposed to be mourning now with the rest of the
family. Mrs. Fiske received him on a shrinking lap, and had found time
to correct one of his indiscretions before she could sigh and say, in
the rear of her aunt’s retreating figure, “I certainly never would let
myself down so”; but Mrs. Harrington took her own counsel, and Jacko
was of her persuasion, for he quickly released himself from Mrs.
Fiske’s dispassionate embrace, and was slinging his body up the
balusters after his mistress.

“Mrs. Harrington,” said Lady Racial, very sweetly swimming to meet her
as she entered the room, “I have intruded upon you, I fear, in
venturing to call upon you at such a time?”

The widow bowed to her, and begged her to be seated.

Lady Racial was an exquisitely silken dame, in whose face a winning
smile was cut, and she was still sufficiently youthful not to be
accused of wearing a flower too artificial.

“It was so sudden! so sad!” she continued. “We esteemed him so much. I
thought you might be in need of sympathy, and hoped I might—Dear Mrs.
Harrington! can you bear to speak of it?”

“I can tell you anything you wish to hear, my lady,” the widow replied.
Lady Racial had expected to meet a woman much more like what she
conceived a tradesman’s wife would be: and the grave reception of her
proffer of sympathy slightly confused her. She said:

“I should not have come, at least not so early, but Sir Jackson, my
husband, thought, and indeed I imagined—You have a son, Mrs.
Harrington? I think his name is—”

“Evan, my lady.”

“Evan. It was of him we have been speaking. I imagined that is, we
thought, Sir Jackson might—you will be writing to him, and will let him
know we will use our best efforts to assist him in obtaining some
position worthy of his—superior to—something that will secure him from
the harassing embarrassments of an uncongenial employment.”

The widow listened to this tender allusion to the shears without a
smile of gratitude. She replied: “I hope my son will return in time to
bury his father, and he will thank you himself, my lady.”

“He has no taste for—a—for anything in the shape of trade, has he, Mrs.
Harrington?”

“I am afraid not, my lady.”

“Any position—a situation—that of a clerk even—would be so much better
for him!”

The widow remained impassive.

“And many young gentlemen I know, who are clerks, and are enabled to
live comfortably, and make a modest appearance in society; and your
son, Mrs. Harrington, he would find it surely an improvement upon—many
would think it a step for him.”

“I am bound to thank you for the interest you take in my son, my lady.”

“Does it not quite suit your views, Mrs. Harrington?” Lady Racial was
surprised at the widow’s manner.

“If my son had only to think of himself, my lady.”

“Oh! but of course,”—the lady understood her now—“of course! You cannot
suppose, Mrs. Harrington, but that I should anticipate he would have
you to live with him, and behave to you in every way as a dutiful son,
surely?

“A clerk’s income is not very large, my lady.”

“No; but enough, as I have said, and with the management you would
bring, Mrs. Harrington, to produce a modest, respectable maintenance.
My respect for your husband, Mrs. Harrington, makes me anxious to press
my services upon you.” Lady Racial could not avoid feeling hurt at the
widow’s want of common gratitude.

“A clerk’s income would not be more than £100 a year, my lady.”

“To begin with—no; certainly not more.” The lady was growing brief.

“If my son puts by the half of that yearly, he can hardly support
himself and his mother, my lady.”

“Half of that yearly, Mrs. Harrington?”

“He would have to do so, and be saddled till he dies, my lady.”

“I really cannot see why.”

Lady Racial had a notion of some excessive niggardly thrift in the
widow, which was arousing symptoms of disgust.

Mrs. Harrington quietly said: “There are his father’s debts to pay, my
lady.”

“His father’s debts!”

“Under £5000, but above £4000, my lady.”

“Five thousand pounds! Mrs. Harrington!” The lady’s delicately gloved
hand gently rose and fell. “And this poor young man”—she pursued.

“My son will have to pay it, my lady.”

For a moment the lady had not a word to instance. Presently she
remarked: “But, Mrs. Harrington, he is surely under no legal
obligation?”

“He is only under the obligation not to cast disrespect on his father’s
memory, my lady; and to be honest, while he can.”

“But, Mrs. Harrington! surely! what can the poor young man do?”

“He will pay it, my lady.”

“But how, Mrs. Harrington?”

“There is his father’s business, my lady.”

His father’s business! Then must the young man become a tradesman in
order to show respect for his father? Preposterous! That was the lady’s
natural inward exclamation. She said, rather shrewdly, for one who knew
nothing of such things: “But a business which produces debts so
enormous, Mrs. Harrington!”

The widow replied: “My son will have to conduct it in a different way.
It would be a very good business, conducted properly, my lady.”

“But if he has no taste for it, Mrs. Harrington? If he is altogether
superior to it?”

For the first time during the interview, the widow’s inflexible
countenance was mildly moved, though not to any mild expression.

“My son will have not to consult his tastes,” she observed: and seeing
the lady, after a short silence, quit her seat, she rose likewise, and
touched the fingers of the hand held forth to her, bowing.

“You will pardon the interest I take in your son,” said Lady Racial. “I
hope, indeed, that his relatives and friends will procure him the means
of satisfying the demands made upon him.”

“He would still have to pay them, my lady,” was the widow’s answer.

“Poor young man! indeed I pity him!” sighed her visitor. “You have
hitherto used no efforts to persuade him to take such a step,—Mrs.
Harrington?”

“I have written to Mr. Goren, who was my husband’s fellow-apprentice in
London, my lady; and he is willing to instruct him in cutting, and
measuring, and keeping accounts.”

Certain words in this speech were obnoxious to the fine ear of Lady
Racial, and she relinquished the subject.

“Your husband, Mrs. Harrington—I should so much have wished!—he did not
pass away in—in pain!”

“He died very calmly, my lady.”

“It is so terrible, so disfiguring, sometimes. One dreads to see!—one
can hardly distinguish! I have known cases where death was dreadful!
But a peaceful death is very beautiful! There is nothing shocking to
the mind. It suggests heaven! It seems a fulfilment of our prayers!”

“Would your ladyship like to look upon him?” said the widow.

Lady Racial betrayed a sudden gleam at having her desire thus
intuitively fathomed.

“For one moment, Mrs. Harrington! We esteemed him so much! May I?”

The widow responded by opening the door, and leading her into the
chamber where the dead man lay.

At that period, when threats of invasion had formerly stirred up the
military fire of us Islanders, the great Mel, as if to show the great
Napoleon what character of being a British shopkeeper really was, had,
by remarkable favour, obtained a lieutenancy of militia dragoons: in
the uniform of which he had revelled, and perhaps, for the only time in
his life, felt that circumstances had suited him with a perfect fit.
However that may be, his solemn final commands to his wife, Henrietta
Maria, on whom he could count for absolute obedience in such matters,
had been, that as soon as the breath had left his body, he should be
taken from his bed, washed, perfumed, powdered, and in that uniform
dressed and laid out; with directions that he should be so buried at
the expiration of three days, that havoc in his features might be
hidden from men. In this array Lady Racial beheld him. The curtains of
the bed were drawn aside. The beams of evening fell soft through the
blinds of the room, and cast a subdued light on the figure of the
vanquished warrior. The Presence, dumb now for evermore, was sadly
illumined for its last exhibition. But one who looked closely might
have seen that Time had somewhat spoiled that perfect fit which had
aforetime been his pride; and now that the lofty spirit had departed,
there had been extreme difficulty in persuading the sullen excess of
clay to conform to the dimensions of those garments. The upper part of
the chest alone would bear its buttons, and across one portion of the
lower limbs an ancient seam had started; recalling an incident to them
who had known him in his brief hour of glory. For one night, as he was
riding home from Fallowfield, and just entering the gates of the town,
a mounted trooper spurred furiously past, and slashing out at him,
gashed his thigh. Mrs. Melchisedec found him lying at his door in a not
unwonted way; carried him up-stairs in her arms, as she had done many a
time before, and did not perceive his condition till she saw the blood
on her gown. The cowardly assailant was never discovered; but Mel was
both gallant and had, in his military career, the reputation of being a
martinet. Hence, divers causes were suspected. The wound failed not to
mend, the trousers were repaired: Peace about the same time was made,
and the affair passed over.

Looking on the fine head and face, Lady Racial saw nothing of this. She
had not looked long before she found covert employment for her
handkerchief. The widow standing beside her did not weep, or reply to
her whispered excuses at emotion; gazing down on his mortal length with
a sort of benignant friendliness; aloof, as one whose duties to that
form of flesh were well-nigh done. At the feet of his master, Jacko,
the monkey, had jumped up, and was there squatted, with his legs
crossed, very like a tailor! The imitative wretch had got a towel, and
as often as Lady Racial’s handkerchief travelled to her eyes, Jacko’s
peery face was hidden, and you saw his lithe skinny body doing grief’s
convulsions till, tired of this amusement, he obtained possession of
the warrior’s helmet, from a small round table on one side of the bed;
a calque of the barbarous military-Georgian form, with a huge knob of
horse-hair projecting over the peak; and under this, trying to adapt it
to his rogue’s head, the tricksy image of Death extinguished himself.

All was very silent in the room. Then the widow quietly disengaged
Jacko, and taking him up, went to the door, and deposited him outside.
During her momentary absence, Lady Racial had time to touch the dead
man’s forehead with her lips, unseen.




CHAPTER III.
THE DAUGHTERS OF THE SHEARS


Three daughters and a son were left to the world by Mr. Melchisedec.
Love, well endowed, had already claimed to provide for the daughters:
first in the shape of a lean Marine subaltern, whose days of
obscuration had now passed, and who had come to be a major of that
corps: secondly, presenting his addresses as a brewer of distinction:
thirdly, and for a climax, as a Portuguese Count: no other than the
Senor Silva Diaz, Conde de Saldar: and this match did seem a far more
resplendent one than that of the two elder sisters with Major Strike
and Mr. Andrew Cogglesby. But the rays of neither fell visibly on
Lymport. These escaped Eurydices never reappeared, after being once
fairly caught away from the gloomy realms of Dis, otherwise Trade. All
three persons of singular beauty, a certain refinement, some Port, and
some Presence, hereditarily combined, they feared the clutch of that
fell king, and performed the widest possible circles around him. Not
one of them ever approached the house of her parents. They were dutiful
and loving children, and wrote frequently; but of course they had to
consider their new position, and their husbands, and their husbands’
families, and the world, and what it would say, if to it the dreaded
rumour should penetrate! Lymport gossips, as numerous as in other
parts, declared that the foreign nobleman would rave in an
extraordinary manner, and do things after the outlandish fashion of his
country: for from him, there was no doubt, the shop had been most
successfully veiled, and he knew not of Pluto’s close relationship to
his lovely spouse.

The marriages had happened in this way. Balls are given in country
towns, where the graces of tradesmen’s daughters may be witnessed and
admired at leisure by other than tradesmen: by occasional country
gentlemen of the neighbourhood, with light minds: and also by small
officers: subalterns wishing to do tender execution upon man’s fair
enemy, and to find a distraction for their legs. The classes of our
social fabric have, here and there, slight connecting links, and
provincial public balls are one of these. They are dangerous, for Cupid
is no respecter of class-prejudice; and if you are the son of a retired
tea-merchant, or of a village doctor, or of a half-pay captain, or of
anything superior, and visit one of them, you are as likely to receive
his shot as any shopboy. Even masquerading lords at such places, have
been known to be slain outright; and although Society allows to its
highest and dearest to save the honour of their families, and heal
their anguish, by indecorous compromise, you, if you are a trifle below
that mark, must not expect it. You must absolutely give yourself for
what you hope to get. Dreadful as it sounds to philosophic ears, you
must marry. This, having danced with Caroline Harrington, the gallant
Lieutenant Strike determined to do. Nor, when he became aware of her
father’s occupation, did he shrink from his resolve. After a month’s
hard courtship, he married her straight out of her father’s house. That
he may have all the credit due to him, it must be admitted that he did
not once compare, or possibly permit himself to reflect on, the
dissimilarity in their respective ranks, and the step he had taken
downward, till they were man and wife: and then not in any great
degree, before Fortune had given him his majority; an advance the good
soldier frankly told his wife he did not owe to her. If we may be
permitted to suppose the colonel of a regiment on friendly terms with
one of his corporals, we have an estimate of the domestic life of Major
and Mrs. Strike. Among the garrison males, his comrades, he passed for
a disgustingly jealous brute.

The ladies, in their pretty language, signalized him as a “finick.”

Now, having achieved so capital a marriage, Caroline, worthy creature,
was anxious that her sisters should not be less happy, and would have
them to visit her, in spite of her husband’s protests.

“There can be no danger,” she said, for she was in fresh quarters, far
from the nest of contagion. The lieutenant himself ungrudgingly
declared that, looking on the ladies, no one for an instant could
suspect; and he saw many young fellows ready to be as great fools as he
had been: another voluntary confession he made to his wife; for the
candour of which she thanked him, and pointed out that it seemed to run
in the family; inasmuch as Mr. Andrew Cogglesby, his rich relative, had
seen and had proposed for Harriet. The lieutenant flatly said he would
never allow it. In fact he had hitherto concealed the non-presentable
portion of his folly very satisfactorily from all save the mess-room,
and Mr. Andrew’s passion was a severe dilemma to him. It need scarcely
be told that his wife, fortified by the fervid brewer, defeated him
utterly. What was more, she induced him to be an accomplice in
deception. For though the lieutenant protested that he washed his hands
of it, and that it was a fraud and a snare, he certainly did not avow
the condition of his wife’s parents to Mr. Andrew, but alluded to them
in passing as “the country people.” He supposed “the country people”
must be asked, he said. The brewer offered to go down to them. But the
lieutenant drew an unpleasant picture of the country people, and his
wife became so grave at the proposal, that Mr. Andrew said he wanted to
marry the lady and not the “country people,” and if she would have him,
there he was. There he was, behaving with a particular and sagacious
kindness to the raw lieutenant since Harriet’s arrival. If the
lieutenant sent her away, Mr. Andrew would infallibly pursue her, and
light on a discovery. Twice cursed by Love, twice the victim of
tailordom, our excellent Marine gave away Harriet Harrington in
marriage to Mr. Andrew Cogglesby.

Thus Joy clapped hands a second time, and Horror deepened its shadows.

From higher ground it was natural that the remaining sister should take
a bolder flight. Of the loves of the fair Louisa Harrington and the
foreign Count, and how she first encountered him in the brewer’s
saloons, and how she, being a humorous person, laughed at his “loaf”
for her, and wore the colours that pleased him, and kindled and soothed
his jealousy, little is known beyond the fact that she espoused the
Count, under the auspices of the affluent brewer, and engaged that her
children should be brought up in the faith of the Catholic Church:
which Lymport gossips called, paying the Devil for her pride.

The three sisters, gloriously rescued by their own charms, had now to
think of their one young brother. How to make him a gentleman! That was
their problem.

Preserve him from tailordom—from all contact with trade—they must;
otherwise they would be perpetually linked to the horrid thing they
hoped to outlive and bury. A cousin of Mr. Melchisedec’s had risen to
be an Admiral and a knight for valiant action in the old war, when men
could rise. Him they besought to take charge of the youth, and make a
distinguished seaman of him. He courteously declined. They then
attacked the married Marine—Navy or Army being quite indifferent to
them as long as they could win for their brother the badge of one
Service, “When he is a gentleman at once!” they said, like those who
see the end of their labours. Strike basely pretended to second them.
It would have been delightful to him, of course, to have the tailor’s
son messing at the same table, and claiming him when he pleased with a
familiar “Ah, brother!” and prating of their relationship everywhere.
Strike had been a fool: in revenge for it he laid out for himself a
masterly career of consequent wisdom. The brewer—uxorious Andrew
Cogglesby—might and would have bought the commission. Strike laughed at
the idea of giving money for what could be got for nothing. He told
them to wait.

In the meantime Evan, a lad of seventeen, spent the hours not devoted
to his positive profession—that of gentleman—in the offices of the
brewery, toying with big books and balances, which he despised with the
combined zeal of the sucking soldier and emancipated tailor.

Two years passed in attendance on the astute brother-in-law, to whom
Fortune now beckoned to come to her and gather his laurels from the
pig-tails. About the same time the Countess sailed over from Lisbon on
a visit to her sister Harriet (in reality, it was whispered in the
Cogglesby saloons, on a diplomatic mission from the Court of Lisbon;
but that could not be made ostensible). The Countess narrowly examined
Evan, whose steady advance in his profession both her sisters praised.

“Yes,” said the Countess, in a languid alien accent. “He has something
of his father’s carriage—something. Something of his delivery—his
readiness.”

It was a remarkable thing that these ladies thought no man on earth
like their father, and always cited him as the example of a perfect
gentleman, and yet they buried him with one mind, and each mounted
guard over his sepulchre, to secure his ghost from an airing.

“He can walk, my dears, certainly, and talk—a little. Tête-à-tête, I do
not say. I should think there he would be—a stick! All you English are.
But what sort of a bow has he got, I ask you? How does he enter a room?
And, then his smile! his laugh! He laughs like a horse—absolutely!
There’s no music in his smile. Oh! you should see a Portuguese nobleman
smile. Oh! Dios! honeyed, my dears! But Evan has it not. None of you
English have. You go so.”

The Countess pressed a thumb and finger to the sides of her mouth, and
set her sisters laughing.

“I assure you, no better! not a bit! I faint in your society. I ask
myself—Where am I? Among what boors have I fallen? But Evan is no worse
than the rest of you; I acknowledge that. If he knew how to dress his
shoulders properly, and to direct his eyes—Oh! the eyes! you should see
how a Portuguese nobleman can use his eyes! Soul! my dears, soul! Can
any of you look the unutterable without being absurd! You look so.”

And the Countess hung her jaw under heavily vacuous orbits, something
as a sheep might yawn.

“But I acknowledge that Evan is no worse than the rest of you,” she
repeated. “If he understood at all the management of his eyes and
mouth! But that’s what he cannot possibly learn in England—not
possibly! As for your poor husband, Harriet! one really has to remember
his excellent qualities to forgive him, poor man! And that stiff
bandbox of a man of yours, Caroline!” addressing the wife of the
Marine, “he looks as if he were all angles and sections, and were taken
to pieces every night and put together in the morning. He may be a good
soldier—good anything you will—but, Dios! to be married to that! He is
not civilized. None of you English are. You have no place in the
drawing-room. You are like so many intrusive oxen—absolutely! One of
your men trod on my toe the other night, and what do you think the
creature did? Jerks back, then the half of him forward—I thought he was
going to break in two—then grins, and grunts, ‘Oh! ’m sure, beg pardon,
’m sure!’ I don’t know whether he didn’t say, MA’AM!”

The Countess lifted her hands, and fell away in laughing horror. When
her humour, or her feelings generally, were a little excited, she spoke
her vernacular as her sisters did, but immediately subsided into the
deliberate delicately-syllabled drawl.

“Now that happened to me once at one of our great Balls,” she pursued.
“I had on one side of me the Duchesse Eugenia de Formosa de
Fontandigua; on the other sat the Countess de Pel, a widow. And we were
talking of the ices that evening. Eugenia, you must know, my dears, was
in love with the Count Belmaraña. I was her sole confidante. The
Countess de Pel—a horrible creature! Oh! she was the Duchess’s
determined enemy—would have stabbed her for Belmaraña, one of the most
beautiful men! Adored by every woman! So we talked ices, Eugenic and
myself, quite comfortably, and that horrible De Pel had no idea in
life! Eugenia had just said, ‘This ice sickens me! I do not taste the
flavour of the vanille.’ I answered, ‘It is here! It must—it cannot but
be here! You love the flavour of the vanille?’ With her exquisite
smile, I see her now saying, ‘Too well! it is necessary to me! I live
on it!’—when up he came. In his eagerness, his foot just effleured my
robe. Oh! I never shall forget! In an instant he was down on one knee
it was so momentary that none saw it but we three, and done with
ineffable grace. ‘Pardon!’ he said, in his sweet Portuguese; ‘Pardon!’
looking up—the handsomest man I ever beheld; and when I think of that
odious wretch the other night, with his ‘Oh! ’m sure, beg pardon, ’m
sure! ’pon my honour!’ I could have kicked him—I could, indeed!”

Here the Countess laughed out, but relapsed into:

“Alas! that Belmaraña should have betrayed that beautiful trusting
creature to De Pel. Such scandal! a duel!—the Duke was wounded. For a
whole year Eugenia did not dare to appear at Court, but had to remain
immured in her country-house, where she heard that Belmaraña had
married De Pel! It was for her money, of course. Rich as Croesus, and
as wicked as the black man below! as dear papa used to say. By the way,
weren’t we talking of Evan? Ah,—yes!”

And so forth. The Countess was immensely admired, and though her
sisters said that she was “foreignized” overmuch, they clung to her
desperately. She seemed so entirely to have eclipsed tailordom, or
“Demogorgon,” as the Countess was pleased to call it. Who could suppose
this grand-mannered lady, with her coroneted anecdotes and delicious
breeding, the daughter of that thing? It was not possible to suppose
it. It seemed to defy the fact itself.

They congratulated her on her complete escape from Demogorgon. The
Countess smiled on them with a lovely sorrow.

“Safe from the whisper, my dears; the ceaseless dread? If you knew what
I have to endure! I sometimes envy you. ’Pon my honour, I sometimes
wish I had married a fishmonger! Silva, indeed, is a most excellent
husband. Polished! such polish as you know not of in England. He has a
way—a wriggle with his shoulders in company—I cannot describe it to
you; so slight! so elegant! and he is all that a woman could desire.
But who could be safe in any part of the earth, my dears, while papa
will go about so, and behave so extraordinarily? I was at dinner at
your English embassy a month ago, and there was Admiral Combleman, then
on the station off Lisbon, Sir Jackson Racial’s friend, who was the
Admiral at Lymport formerly. I knew him at once, and thought, oh! what
shall I do! My heart was like a lump of lead. I would have given worlds
that we might one of us have smothered the other! I had to sit beside
him—it always happens! Thank heaven! he did not identify me. And then
he told an anecdote of Papa. It was the dreadful old ‘Bath’ story. I
thought I should have died. I could not but fancy the Admiral
suspected. Was it not natural? And what do you think I had the audacity
to do? I asked him coolly, whether the Mr. Harrington he mentioned was
not the son of Sir Abraham Harrington, of Torquay,—the gentleman who
lost his yacht in the Lisbon waters last year? I brought it on myself.
“Gentleman, ma’am,—MA’AM!” says the horrid old creature, laughing,
“gentleman! he’s a —— I cannot speak it: I choke!” And then he began
praising Papa. Dios! what I suffered. But, you know, I can keep my
countenance, if I perish. I am a Harrington as much as any of us!”

And the Countess looked superb in the pride with which she said she was
what she would have given her hand not to be. But few feelings are
single on this globe, and junction of sentiments need not imply unity
in our yeasty compositions.

“After it was over—my supplice,” continued the Countess, “I was
questioned by all the ladies—I mean our ladies—not your English. They
wanted to know how I could be so civil to that intolerable man. I
gained a deal of credit, my dears. I laid it all on—Diplomacy.” The
Countess laughed bitterly. “Diplomacy bears the burden of it all. I
pretended that Combleman could be useful to Silva! Oh! what hypocrites
we all are!”

The ladies listening could not gainsay this favourite claim of
universal brotherhood among the select who wear masks instead of faces.

With regard to Evan, the Countess had far outstripped her sisters in
her views. A gentleman she had discovered must have one of two things—a
title or money. He might have all the breeding in the world; he might
be as good as an angel; but without a title or money he was under
eclipse almost total. On a gentleman the sun must shine. Now, Evan had
no title, no money. The clouds were thick above the youth. To gain a
title he would have to scale aged mountains. There was one break in his
firmament through which the radiant luminary might be assisted to cast
its beams on him still young. That divine portal was matrimony. If he
could but make a rich marriage he would blaze transfigured; all would
be well! And why should not Evan marry an heiress, as well as another?

“I know a young creature who would exactly suit him,” said the
Countess. “She is related to the embassy, and is in Lisbon now. A
charming child—just sixteen! Dios! how the men rave about her! and she
isn’t a beauty,—there’s the wonder; and she is a little too gauche—too
English in her habits and ways of thinking; likes to be admired, of
course, but doesn’t know yet how to set about getting it. She rather
scandalizes our ladies, but when you know her!—She will have, they say,
a hundred thousand pounds in her own right! Rose Jocelyn, the daughter
of Sir Franks, and that eccentric Lady Jocelyn. She is with her uncle,
Melville, the celebrated diplomate though, to tell you the truth, we
turn him round our fingers, and spin him as the boys used to do the
cockchafers. I cannot forget our old Fallowfield school-life, you see,
my dears. Well, Rose Jocelyn would just suit Evan. She is just of an
age to receive an impression. And I would take care she did. Instance
me a case where I have failed?

“Or there is the Portuguese widow, the Rostral. She’s thirty,
certainly; but she possesses millions! Estates all over the kingdom,
and the sweetest creature. But, no. Evan would be out of the way there,
certainly. But—our women are very nice: they have the dearest, sweetest
ways: but I would rather Evan did not marry one of them. And then
there’s the religion!”

This was a sore of the Countess’s own, and she dropped a tear in coming
across it.

“No, my dears, it shall be Rose Jocelyn!” she concluded: “I will take
Evan over with me, and see that he has opportunities. It shall be Rose,
and then I can call her mine; for in verity I love the child.”

It is not my part to dispute the Countess’s love for Miss Jocelyn; and
I have only to add that Evan, unaware of the soft training he was to
undergo, and the brilliant chance in store for him, offered no
impediment to the proposition that he should journey to Portugal with
his sister (whose subtlest flattery was to tell him that she should not
be ashamed to own him there); and ultimately, furnished with cash for
the trip by the remonstrating brewer, went.

So these Parcae, daughters of the shears, arranged and settled the
young man’s fate. His task was to learn the management of his mouth,
how to dress his shoulders properly, and to direct his eyes—rare
qualities in man or woman, I assure you; the management of the mouth
being especially admirable, and correspondingly difficult. These
achieved, he was to place his battery in position, and win the heart
and hand of an heiress.

Our comedy opens with his return from Portugal, in company with Miss
Rose, the heiress; the Honourable Melville Jocelyn, the diplomate; and
the Count and Countess de Saldar, refugees out of that explosive little
kingdom.




CHAPTER IV.
ON BOARD THE JOCASTA


From the Tagus to the Thames the Government sloop-of-war, Jocasta, had
made a prosperous voyage, bearing that precious freight, a removed
diplomatist and his family; for whose uses let a sufficient vindication
be found in the exercise he affords our crews in the science of
seamanship. She entered our noble river somewhat early on a fine July
morning. Early as it was, two young people, who had nothing to do with
the trimming or guiding of the vessel, stood on deck, and watched the
double-shore, beginning to embrace them more and more closely as they
sailed onward. One, a young lady, very young in manner, wore a black
felt hat with a floating scarlet feather, and was clad about the
shoulders in a mantle of foreign style and pattern. The other you might
have taken for a wandering Don, were such an object ever known; so
simply he assumed the dusky sombrero and dangling cloak, of which one
fold was flung across his breast and drooped behind him. The line of an
adolescent dark moustache ran along his lip, and only at intervals
could you see that his eyes were blue and of the land he was nearing.
For the youth was meditative, and held his head much down. The young
lady, on the contrary, permitted an open inspection of her countenance,
and seemed, for the moment at least, to be neither caring nor thinking
of what kind of judgement would be passed on her. Her pretty nose was
up, sniffing the still salt breeze with vivacious delight.

“Oh!” she cried, clapping her hands, “there goes a dear old English
gull! How I have wished to see him! I haven’t seen one for two years
and seven months. When I’m at home, I’ll leave my window open all
night, just to hear the rooks, when they wake in the morning. There
goes another!”

She tossed up her nose again, exclaiming:

“I’m sure I smell England nearer and nearer! I smell the fields, and
the cows in them. I’d have given anything to be a dairy-maid for half
an hour! I used to lie and pant in that stifling air among those stupid
people, and wonder why anybody ever left England. Aren’t you glad to
come back?”

This time the fair speaker lent her eyes to the question, and shut her
lips; sweet, cold, chaste lips she had: a mouth that had not yet
dreamed of kisses, and most honest eyes.

The young man felt that they were not to be satisfied by his own, and
after seeking to fill them with a doleful look, which was immediately
succeeded by one of superhuman indifference, he answered:

“Yes! We shall soon have to part!” and commenced tapping with his foot
the cheerful martyr’s march.

Speech that has to be hauled from the depths usually betrays the
effort. Listening an instant to catch the import of this cavernous gasp
upon the brink of sound, the girl said:

“Part? what do you mean?”

Apparently it required a yet vaster effort to pronounce an explanation.
The doleful look, the superhuman indifference, were repeated in due
order: sound, a little more distinct, uttered the words:

“We cannot be as we have been, in England!” and then the cheerful
martyr took a few steps farther.

“Why, you don’t mean to say you’re going to give me up, and not be
friends with me, because we’ve come back to England?” cried the girl in
a rapid breath, eyeing him seriously.

Most conscientiously he did not mean it! but he replied with the
quietest negative.

“No?” she mimicked him. “Why do you say ‘No’ like that? Why are you so
mysterious, Evan? Won’t you promise me to come and stop with us for
weeks? Haven’t you said we would ride, and hunt, and fish together, and
read books, and do all sorts of things?”

He replied with the quietest affirmative.

“Yes? What does ‘Yes!’ mean?” She lifted her chest to shake out the
dead-alive monosyllable, as he had done. “Why are you so singular this
morning, Evan? Have I offended you? You are so touchy!”

The slur on his reputation for sensitiveness induced the young man to
attempt being more explicit.

“I mean,” he said, hesitating; “why, we must part. We shall not see
each other every day. Nothing more than that.” And away went the
cheerful martyr in sublimest mood.

“Oh! and that makes you, sorry?” A shade of archness was in her voice.

The girl waited as if to collect something in her mind, and was now a
patronizing woman.

“Why, you dear sentimental boy! You don’t suppose we could see each
other every day for ever?”

It was perhaps the cruelest question that could have been addressed to
the sentimental boy from her mouth. But he was a cheerful martyr!

“You dear Don Doloroso!” she resumed. “I declare if you are not just
like those young Portugals this morning; and over there you were such a
dear English fellow; and that’s why I liked you so much! Do change! Do,
please, be lively, and yourself again. Or mind; I’ll call you Don
Doloroso, and that shall be your name in England. See
there!—that’s—that’s? what’s the name of that place? Hoy! Mr. Skerne!”
She hailed the boatswain, passing, “Do tell me the name of that place.”

Mr. Skerne righted about to satisfy her minutely, and then coming up to
Evan, he touched his hat, and said:

“I mayn’t have another opportunity—we shall be busy up there—of
thankin’ you again, sir, for what you did for my poor drunken brother
Bill, and you may take my word I won’t forget it, sir, if he does; and
I suppose he’ll be drowning his memory just as he was near drowning
himself.”

Evan muttered something, grimaced civilly, and turned away. The girl’s
observant brows were moved to a faintly critical frown, and nodding
intelligently to the boatswain’s remark, that the young gentleman did
not seem quite himself, now that he was nearing home, she went up to
Evan, and said:

“I’m going to give you a lesson in manners, to be quits with you.
Listen, sir. Why did you turn away so ungraciously from Mr. Skerne,
while he was thanking you for having saved his brother’s life? Now
there’s where you’re too English. Can’t you bear to be thanked?”

“I don’t want to be thanked because I can swim,” said Evan.

“But it is not that. Oh, how you trifle!” she cried. “There’s nothing
vexes me so much as that way you have. Wouldn’t my eyes have sparkled
if anybody had come up to me to thank me for such a thing? I would let
them know how glad I was to have done such a thing! Doesn’t it make
them happier, dear Evan?”

“My dear Miss Jocelyn!”

“What?”

The honest grey eyes fixed on him, narrowed their enlarged lids. She
gazed before her on the deck, saying:

“I’m sure I can’t understand you. I suppose it’s because I’m a girl,
and I never shall till I’m a woman. Heigho!”

A youth who is engaged in the occupation of eating his heart, cannot
shine to advantage, and is as much a burden to himself as he is an
enigma to others. Evan felt this; but he could do nothing and say
nothing; so he retired deeper into the folds of the Don, and remained
picturesque and scarcely pleasant.

They were relieved by a summons to breakfast from below.

She brightened and laughed. “Now, what will you wager me, Evan, that
the Countess doesn’t begin:

‘Sweet child! how does she this morning? blooming?’ when she kisses
me?”

Her capital imitation of his sister’s manner constrained him to join in
her laugh, and he said:

“I’ll back against that, I get three fingers from your uncle, and
‘Morrow, young sir!’”

Down they ran together, laughing; and, sure enough, the identical words
of the respective greetings were employed, which they had to enjoy with
all the discretion they could muster.

Rose went round the table to her little cousin Alec, aged seven, kissed
his reluctant cheek, and sat beside him, announcing a sea appetite and
great capabilities, while Evan silently broke bread. The Count de
Saldar, a diminutive tawny man, just a head and neck above the
tablecloth, sat sipping chocolate and fingering dry toast, which he
would now and then dip in jelly, and suck with placidity, in the
intervals of a curt exchange of French with the wife of the Hon.
Melville, a ringleted English lady, or of Portuguese with the Countess;
who likewise sipped chocolate and fingered dry toast, and was
mournfully melodious. The Hon. Melville, as became a tall islander,
carved beef, and ate of it, like a ruler of men. Beautiful to see was
the compassionate sympathy of the Countess’s face when Rose offered her
plate for a portion of the world-subjugating viand, as who should say:
“Sweet child! thou knowest not yet of sorrows, thou canst ballast thy
stomach with beef!” In any other than an heiress, she would probably
have thought: “This is indeed a disgusting little animal, and most
unfeminine conduct!”

Rose, unconscious of praise or blame, rivalled her uncle in enjoyment
of the fare, and talked of her delight in seeing England again, and
anything that belonged to her native land. Mrs. Melville perceived that
it pained the refugee Countess, and gave her the glance intelligible;
but the Countess never missed glances, or failed to interpret them. She
said:

“Let her. I love to hear the sweet child’s prattle.”

“It was fortunate” (she addressed the diplomatist) “that we touched at
Southampton and procured fresh provision!”

“Very lucky for US!” said he, glaring shrewdly between a mouthful.

The Count heard the word “Southampton,” and wished to know how it was
comprised. A passage of Portuguese ensued, and then the Countess said:

“Silva, you know, desired to relinquish the vessel at Southampton. He
does not comprehend the word ‘expense,’ but” (she shook a dumb Alas!)
“I must think of that for him now!”

“Oh! always avoid expense,” said the Hon. Melville, accustomed to be
paid for by his country.

“At what time shall we arrive, may I ask, do you think?” the Countess
gently inquired.

The watch of a man who had his eye on Time was pulled out, and she was
told it might be two hours before dark. Another reckoning, keenly
balanced, informed the company that the day’s papers could be expected
on board somewhere about three o’clock in the afternoon.

“And then,” said the Hon. Melville, nodding general gratulation, “we
shall know how the world wags.”

How it had been wagging the Countess’s straining eyes under closed
eyelids were eloquent of.

“Too late, I fear me, to wait upon Lord Livelyston to-night?” she
suggested.

“To-night?” The Hon. Melville gazed blank astonishment at the notion.
“Oh! certainly, too late tonight. A-hum! I think, madam, you had better
not be in too great a hurry to see him. Repose a little. Recover your
fatigue.”

“Oh!” exclaimed the Countess, with a beam of utter confidence in him,
“I shall be too happy to place myself in your hands—believe me.”

This was scarcely more to the taste of the diplomatist. He put up his
mouth, and said, blandly:

“I fear—you know, madam, I must warn you beforehand—I, personally, am
but an insignificant unit over here, you know; I, personally, can’t
guarantee much assistance to you—not positive. What I can do—of course,
very happy!” And he fell to again upon the beef.

“Not so very insignificant!” said the Countess, smiling, as at a softly
radiant conception of him.

“Have to bob and bow like the rest of them over here,” he added, proof
against the flattery.

“But that you will not forsake Silva, I am convinced,” said the
Countess; and, paying little heed to his brief “Oh! what I can do,”
continued: “For over here, in England, we are almost friendless. My
relations—such as are left of them—are not in high place.” She turned
to Mrs. Melville, and renewed the confession with a proud humility.
“Truly, I have not a distant cousin in the Cabinet!”

Mrs. Melville met her sad smile, and returned it, as one who understood
its entire import.

“My brother-in-law—my sister, I think, you know—married a—a brewer! He
is rich; but, well! such was her taste! My brother-in-law is indeed in
Parliament, and he—”

“Very little use, seeing he votes with the opposite party,” the
diplomatist interrupted her.

“Ah! but he will not,” said the Countess, serenely. “I can trust with
confidence that, if it is for Silva’s interest, he will assuredly so
dispose of his influence as to suit the desiderations of his family,
and not in any way oppose his opinions to the powers that would
willingly stoop to serve us!”

It was impossible for the Hon. Melville to withhold a slight grimace at
his beef, when he heard this extremely alienized idea of the nature of
a member of the Parliament of Great Britain. He allowed her to enjoy
her delusion, as she pursued:

“No. So much we could offer in repayment. It is little! But this, in
verity, is a case. Silva’s wrongs have only to be known in England, and
I am most assured that the English people will not permit it. In the
days of his prosperity, Silva was a friend to England, and England
should not—should not—forget it now. Had we money! But of that arm our
enemies have deprived us: and, I fear, without it we cannot hope to
have the justice of our cause pleaded in the English papers. Mr.
Redner, you know, the correspondent in Lisbon, is a sworn foe to Silva.
And why but because I would not procure him an invitation to Court! The
man was so horridly vulgar; his gloves were never clean; I had to hold
a bouquet to my nose when I talked to him. That, you say, was my fault!
Truly so. But what woman can be civil to a low-bred, pretentious,
offensive man?”

Mrs. Melville, again appealed to, smiled perfect sympathy, and said, to
account for his character:

“Yes. He is the son of a small shopkeeper of some kind, in Southampton,
I hear.”

“A very good fellow in his way,” said her husband.

“Oh! I can’t bear that class of people,” Rose exclaimed. “I always keep
out of their way. You can always tell them.”

The Countess smiled considerate approbation of her exclusiveness and
discernment. So sweet a smile!

“You were on deck early, my dear?” she asked Evan, rather abruptly.

Master Alec answered for him: “Yes, he was, and so was Rose. They made
an appointment, just as they used to do under the oranges.”

“Children!” the Countess smiled to Mrs. Melville.

“They always whisper when I’m by,” Alec appended.

“Children!” the Countess’s sweetened visage entreated Mrs. Melville to
re-echo; but that lady thought it best for the moment to direct Rose to
look to her packing, now that she had done breakfast.

“And I will take a walk with my brother on deck,” said the Countess.
“Silva is too harassed for converse.”

The parties were thus divided. The silent Count was left to meditate on
his wrongs in the saloon; and the diplomatist, alone with his lady,
thought fit to say to her, shortly: “Perhaps it would be as well to
draw away from these people a little. We’ve done as much as we could
for them, in bringing them over here. They may be trying to compromise
us. That woman’s absurd. She’s ashamed of the brewer, and yet she wants
to sell him—or wants us to buy him. Ha! I think she wants us to send a
couple of frigates, and threaten bombardment of the capital, if they
don’t take her husband back, and receive him with honours.”

“Perhaps it would be as well,” said Mrs. Melville. “Rose’s invitation
to him goes for nothing.”

“Rose? inviting the Count? down to Hampshire?” The diplomatist’s brows
were lifted.

“No, I mean the other,” said the diplomatist’s wife.

“Oh! the young fellow! very good young fellow. Gentlemanly. No harm in
him.”

“Perhaps not,” said the diplomatist’s wife.

“You don’t suppose he expects us to keep him on, or provide for him
over here—eh?”

The diplomatist’s wife informed him that such was not her thought, that
he did not understand, and that it did not matter; and as soon as the
Hon. Melville saw that she was brooding something essentially feminine,
and which had no relationship to the great game of public life,
curiosity was extinguished in him.

On deck the Countess paced with Evan, and was for a time pleasantly
diverted by the admiration she could, without looking, perceive that
her sorrow-subdued graces had aroused in the breast of a susceptible
naval lieutenant. At last she spoke:

“My dear! remember this. Your last word to Mr. Jocelyn will be: ‘I will
do myself the honour to call upon my benefactor early.’ To Rose you
will say: ‘Be assured, Miss Jocelyn “Miss Jocelyn—” I shall not fail in
hastening to pay my respects to your family in Hampshire.’ You will
remember to do it, in the exact form I speak it.”

Evan laughed: “What! call him benefactor to his face? I couldn’t do
it.”

“Ah! my child!”

“Besides, he isn’t a benefactor at all. His private secretary died, and
I stepped in to fill the post, because nobody else was handy.”

“And tell me of her who pushed you forward, Evan?”

“My dear sister, I’m sure I’m not ungrateful.”

“No; but headstrong: opinionated. Now these people will endeavour—Oh! I
have seen it in a thousand little things—they wish to shake us off.
Now, if you will but do as I indicate! Put your faith in an older head,
Evan. It is your only chance of society in England. For your
brother-in-law—I ask you, what sort of people will you meet at the
Cogglesbys? Now and then a nobleman, very much out of his element. In
short, you have fed upon a diet which will make you to distinguish, and
painfully to know the difference! Indeed! Yes, you are looking about
for Rose. It depends upon your behaviour now, whether you are to see
her at all in England. Do you forget? You wished once to inform her of
your origin. Think of her words at the breakfast this morning!”

The Countess imagined she had produced an impression. Evan said: “Yes,
and I should have liked to have told her this morning that I’m myself
nothing more than the son of a—”

“Stop! cried his sister, glancing about in horror. The admiring
lieutenant met her eye. Blandishingly she smiled on him: “Most
beautiful weather for a welcome to dear England?” and passed with
majesty.

“Boy!” she resumed, “are you mad?”

“I hate being such a hypocrite, madam.”

“Then you do not love her, Evan?”

This may have been dubious logic, but it resulted from a clear sequence
of ideas in the lady’s head. Evan did not contest it.

“And assuredly you will lose her, Evan. Think of my troubles! I have to
intrigue for Silva; I look to your future; I smile, Oh heaven! how do I
not smile when things are spoken that pierce my heart! This morning at
the breakfast!”

Evan took her hand, and patted it.

“What is your pity?” she sighed.

“If it had not been for you, my dear sister, I should never have held
my tongue.”

“You are not a Harrington! You are a Dawley!” she exclaimed,
indignantly.

Evan received the accusation of possessing more of his mother’s spirit
than his father’s in silence.

“You would not have held your tongue,” she said, with fervid severity:
“and you would have betrayed yourself! and you would have said you were
that! and you in that costume! Why, goodness gracious! could you bear
to appear so ridiculous?”

The poor young man involuntarily surveyed his person. The pains of an
impostor seized him. The deplorable image of the Don making confession
became present to his mind. It was a clever stroke of this female
intriguer. She saw him redden grievously, and blink his eyes; and not
wishing to probe him so that he would feel intolerable disgust at his
imprisonment in the Don, she continued:

“But you have the sense to see your duties, Evan. You have an excellent
sense, in the main. No one would dream—to see you. You did not, I must
say, you did not make enough of your gallantry. A Portuguese who had
saved a man’s life, Evan, would he have been so boorish? You behaved as
if it was a matter of course that you should go overboard after
anybody, in your clothes, on a dark night. So, then, the Jocelyns took
it. I barely heard one compliment to you. And Rose—what an effect it
should have had on her! But, owing to your manner, I do believe the
girl thinks it nothing but your ordinary business to go overboard after
anybody, in your clothes, on a dark night. ’Pon my honour, I believe
she expects to see you always dripping!” The Countess uttered a burst
of hysterical humour. “So you miss your credit. That inebriated sailor
should really have been gold to you. Be not so young and thoughtless.”

The Countess then proceeded to tell him how foolishly he had let slip
his great opportunity. A Portuguese would have fixed the young lady
long before. By tender moonlight, in captivating language, beneath the
umbrageous orange-groves, a Portuguese would have accurately calculated
the effect of the perfume of the blossom on her sensitive nostrils, and
know the exact moment when to kneel, and declare his passion
sonorously.

“Yes,” said Evan, “one of them did. She told me.”

“She told you? And you—what did you do?”

“Laughed at him with her, to be sure.”

“Laughed at him! She told you, and you helped her to laugh at love!
Have you no perceptions? Why did she tell you?”

“Because she thought him such a fool, I suppose.”

“You never will know a woman,” said the Countess, with contempt.

Much of his worldly sister at a time was more than Evan could bear.
Accustomed to the symptoms of restiveness, she finished her discourse,
enjoyed a quiet parade up and down under the gaze of the lieutenant,
and could find leisure to note whether she at all struck the inferior
seamen, even while her mind was absorbed by the multiform troubles and
anxieties for which she took such innocent indemnification.

The appearance of the Hon. Melville Jocelyn on deck, and without his
wife, recalled her to business. It is a peculiarity of female
diplomatists that they fear none save their own sex. Men they regard as
their natural prey: in women they see rival hunters using their own
weapons. The Countess smiled a slowly-kindling smile up to him, set her
brother adrift, and delicately linked herself to Evan’s benefactor.

“I have been thinking,” she said, “knowing your kind and most
considerate attentions, that we may compromise you in England.”

He at once assured her he hoped not, he thought not at all.

“The idea is due to my brother,” she went on; “for I—women know so
little!—and most guiltlessly should we have done so. My brother perhaps
does not think of us foremost; but his argument I can distinguish. I
can see, that were you openly to plead Silva’s cause, you might bring
yourself into odium, Mr. Jocelyn; and heaven knows I would not that!
May I then ask, that in England we may be simply upon the same footing
of private friendship?”

The diplomatist looked into her uplifted visage, that had all the
sugary sparkles of a crystallized preserved fruit of the Portugal
clime, and observed, confidentially, that, with every willingness in
the world to serve her, he did think it would possibly be better, for a
time, to be upon that footing, apart from political considerations.

“I was very sure my brother would apprehend your views,” said the
Countess. “He, poor boy! his career is closed. He must sink into a
different sphere. He will greatly miss the intercourse with you and
your sweet family.”

Further relieved, the diplomatist delivered a high opinion of the young
gentleman, his abilities, and his conduct, and trusted he should see
him frequently.

By an apparent sacrifice, the lady thus obtained what she wanted.

Near the hour speculated on by the diplomatist, the papers came on
board, and he, unaware how he had been manoeuvred for lack of a wife at
his elbow, was quickly engaged in appeasing the great British hunger
for news; second only to that for beef, it seems, and equally
acceptable salted when it cannot be had fresh.

Leaving the devotee of statecraft with his legs crossed, and his face
wearing the cognizant air of one whose head is above the waters of
events, to enjoy the mighty meal of fresh and salted at discretion, the
Countess dived below.

Meantime the Jocasta, as smoothly as before she was ignorant of how the
world wagged, slipped up the river with the tide; and the sun hung red
behind the forest of masts, burnishing a broad length of the serpentine
haven of the nations of the earth. A young Englishman returning home
can hardly look on this scene without some pride of kinship. Evan stood
at the fore part of the vessel. Rose, in quiet English attire, had
escaped from her aunt to join him, singing in his ears, to spur his
senses: “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it beautiful? Dear old England!”

“What do you find so beautiful?” he asked.

“Oh, you dull fellow! Why the ships, and the houses, and the smoke, to
be sure.”

“The ships? Why, I thought you despised trade, mademoiselle?”

“And so I do. That is, not trade, but tradesmen. Of course, I mean
shopkeepers.”

“It’s they who send the ships to and fro, and make the picture that
pleases you, nevertheless.”

“Do they?” said she, indifferently, and then with a sort of fervour,
“Why do you always grow so cold to me whenever we get on this subject?”

“I cold?” Evan responded. The incessant fears of his diplomatic sister
had succeeded in making him painfully jealous of this subject. He
turned it off. “Why, our feelings are just the same. Do you know what I
was thinking when you came up? I was thinking that I hoped I might
never disgrace the name of an Englishman.”

“Now, that’s noble!” cried the girl. “And I’m sure you never will. Of
an English gentleman, Evan. I like that better.”

“Would you rather be called a true English lady than a true English
woman, Rose?”

“Don’t think I would, my dear,” she answered, pertly; “but ‘gentleman’
always means more than ‘man’ to me.”

“And what’s a gentleman, mademoiselle?”

“Can’t tell you, Don Doloroso. Something you are, sir,” she added,
surveying him.

Evan sucked the bitter and the sweet of her explanation. His sister in
her anxiety to put him on his guard, had not beguiled him to forget his
real state.

His sister, the diplomatist and his lady, the refugee Count, with
ladies’ maids, servants, and luggage, were now on the main-deck, and
Master Alec, who was as good as a newspaper correspondent for private
conversations, put an end to the colloquy of the young people. They
were all assembled in a circle when the vessel came to her moorings.
The diplomatist glutted with news, and thirsting for confirmations; the
Count dumb, courteous, and quick-eyed; the honourable lady complacent
in the consciousness of boxes well packed; the Countess breathing
mellifluous long-drawn adieux that should provoke invitations. Evan and
Rose regarded each other.

The boat to convey them on shore was being lowered, and they were
preparing to move forward. Just then the vessel was boarded by a
stranger.

“Is that one of the creatures of your Customs? I did imagine we were
safe from them,” exclaimed the Countess.

The diplomatist laughingly requested her to save herself anxiety on
that score, while under his wing. But she had drawn attention to the
intruder, who was seen addressing one of the midshipmen. He was a man
in a long brown coat and loose white neckcloth, spectacles on nose,
which he wore considerably below the bridge and peered over, as if
their main use were to sight his eye; a beaver hat, with broadish brim,
on his head. A man of no station, it was evident to the ladies at once,
and they would have taken no further notice of him had he not been seen
stepping toward them in the rear of the young midshipman.

The latter came to Evan, and said: “A fellow of the name of Goren wants
you. Says there’s something the matter at home.”

Evan advanced, and bowed stiffly.

Mr. Goren held out his hand. “You don’t remember me, young man? I cut
out your first suit for you when you were breeched, though! Yes-ah!
Your poor father wouldn’t put his hand to it. Goren!”

Embarrassed, and not quite alive to the chapter of facts this name
should have opened to him, Evan bowed again.

“Goren!” continued the possessor of the name. He had a cracked voice,
that when he spoke a word of two syllables, commenced with a lugubrious
crow, and ended in what one might have taken for a curious question.

“It is a bad business brings me, young man. I’m not the best messenger
for such tidings. It’s a black suit, young man! It’s your father!”

The diplomatist and his lady gradually edged back but Rose remained
beside the Countess, who breathed quick, and seemed to have lost her
self-command.

Thinking he was apprehended, Mr. Goren said: “I’m going down to-night
to take care of the shop. He’s to be buried in his old uniform. You had
better come with me by the night-coach, if you would see the last of
him, young man.”

Breaking an odd pause that had fallen, the Countess cried aloud,
suddenly:

“In his uniform!”

Mr. Goren felt his arm seized and his legs hurrying him some paces into
isolation. “Thanks! thanks!” was murmured in his ear. “Not a word more.
Evan cannot bear it. Oh! you are good to have come, and we are
grateful. My father! my father!”

She had to tighten her hand and wrist against her bosom to keep herself
up. She had to reckon in a glance how much Rose had heard, or divined.
She had to mark whether the Count had understood a syllable. She had to
whisper to Evan to hasten away with the horrible man.

She had to enliven his stunned senses, and calm her own. And with
mournful images of her father in her brain, the female Spartan had to
turn to Rose, and speculate on the girl’s reflective brows, while she
said, as over a distant relative, sadly, but without distraction: “A
death in the family!” and preserved herself from weeping her heart out,
that none might guess the thing who did not positively know it. Evan
touched the hand of Rose without meeting her eyes. He was soon cast off
in Mr. Goren’s boat. Then the Countess murmured final adieux; twilight
under her lids, but yet a smile, stately, affectionate, almost genial.
Rose, her sweet Rose, she must kiss. She could have slapped Rose for
appearing so reserved and cold. She hugged Rose, as to hug oblivion of
the last few minutes into her. The girl leant her cheek, and bore the
embrace, looking on her with a kind of wonder.

Only when alone with the Count, in the brewer’s carriage awaiting her
on shore, did the lady give a natural course to her grief; well knowing
that her Silva would attribute it to the darkness of their common
exile. She wept: but in the excess of her misery, two words of
strangely opposite signification, pronounced by Mr. Goren; two words
that were at once poison and antidote, sang in her brain; two words
that painted her dead father from head to foot, his nature and his
fortune: these were the Shop, and the Uniform.

Oh! what would she not have given to have seen and bestowed on her
beloved father one last kiss! Oh! how she hoped that her inspired echo
of Uniform, on board the Jocasta, had drowned the memory, eclipsed the
meaning, of that fatal utterance of Shop!




CHAPTER V.
THE FAMILY AND THE FUNERAL


It was the evening of the second day since the arrival of the black
letter in London from Lymport, and the wife of the brewer and the wife
of the Major sat dropping tears into one another’s laps, in expectation
of their sister the Countess. Mr. Andrew Cogglesby had not yet returned
from his office. The gallant Major had gone forth to dine with General
Sir George Frebuter, the head of the Marines of his time. It would have
been difficult for the Major, he informed his wife, to send in an
excuse to the General for non-attendance, without entering into
particulars; and that he should tell the General he could not dine with
him, because of the sudden decease of a tailor, was, as he let his wife
understand, and requested her to perceive, quite out of the question.
So he dressed himself carefully, and though peremptory with his wife
concerning his linen, and requiring natural services from her in the
button department, and a casual expression of contentment as to his
ultimate make-up, he left her that day without any final injunctions to
occupy her mind, and she was at liberty to weep if she pleased, a
privilege she did not enjoy undisturbed when he was present; for the
warrior hated that weakness, and did not care to hide his contempt for
it.

Of the three sisters, the wife of the Major was, oddly enough, the one
who was least inveterately solicitous of concealing the fact of her
parentage. Reticence, of course, she had to study with the rest; the
Major was a walking book of reticence and the observances; he
professed, also, in company with herself alone, to have had much
trouble in drilling her to mark and properly preserve them. She had no
desire to speak of her birthplace. But, for some reason or other, she
did not share her hero’s rather petulant anxiety to keep the curtain
nailed down on that part of her life which preceded her entry into the
ranks of the Royal Marines. Some might have thought that those fair
large blue eyes of hers wandered now and then in pleasant unambitious
walks behind the curtain, and toyed with little flowers of palest
memory. Utterly tasteless, totally wanting in discernment, not to say
gratitude, the Major could not presume her to be; and yet his wits
perceived that her answers and the conduct she shaped in accordance
with his repeated protests and long-reaching apprehensions of what he
called danger, betrayed acquiescent obedience more than the connubial
sympathy due to him. Danger on the field the Major knew not of; he did
not scruple to name the word in relation to his wife. For, as he told
her, should he, some day, as in the chapter of accidents might occur,
sally into the street a Knight Companion of the Bath and become known
to men as Sir Maxwell Strike, it would be decidedly disagreeable for
him to be blown upon by a wind from Lymport. Moreover she was the
mother of a son. The Major pointed out to her the duty she owed her
offspring. Certainly the protecting aegis of his rank and title would
be over the lad, but she might depend upon it any indiscretion of hers
would damage him in his future career, the Major assured her. Young
Maxwell must be considered.

For all this, the mother and wife, when the black letter found them in
the morning at breakfast, had burst into a fit of grief, and faltered
that she wept for a father. Mrs. Andrew, to whom the letter was
addressed, had simply held the letter to her in a trembling hand. The
Major compared their behaviour, with marked encomiums of Mrs. Andrew.
Now this lady and her husband were in obverse relative positions. The
brewer had no will but his Harriet’s. His esteem for her combined the
constitutional feelings of an insignificantly-built little man for a
majestic woman, and those of a worthy soul for the wife of his bosom.
Possessing, or possessed by her, the good brewer was perfectly happy.
She, it might be thought, under these circumstances, would not have
minded much his hearing what he might hear. It happened, however, that
she was as jealous of the winds of Lymport as the Major himself; as
vigilant in debarring them from access to the brewery as now the
Countess could have been. We are not dissecting human nature suffice
it, therefore, from a mere glance at the surface, to say, that just as
moneyed men are careful of their coin, women who have all the
advantages in a conjunction, are miserly in keeping them, and shudder
to think that one thing remains hidden, which the world they move in
might put down pityingly in favour of their spouse, even though to the
little man ’twere naught. She assumed that a revelation would diminish
her moral stature; and certainly it would not increase that of her
husband. So no good could come of it. Besides, Andrew knew, his whole
conduct was a tacit admission, that she had condescended in giving him
her hand. The features of their union might not be changed altogether
by a revelation, but it would be a shock to her.

Consequently, Harriet tenderly rebuked Caroline, for her outcry at the
breakfast-table; and Caroline, the elder sister, who had not since
marriage grown in so free an air, excused herself humbly, and the two
were weeping when the Countess joined them and related what she had
just undergone.

Hearing of Caroline’s misdemeanour, however, Louisa’s eyes rolled aloft
in a paroxysm of tribulation. It was nothing to Caroline; it was
comparatively nothing to Harriet; but the Count knew not Louisa had a
father: believed that her parents had long ago been wiped out. And the
Count was by nature inquisitive: and if he once cherished a suspicion
he was restless; he was pointed in his inquiries: he was pertinacious
in following out a clue: there never would be peace with him! And then,
as they were secure in their privacy, Louisa cried aloud for her
father, her beloved father! Harriet wept silently. Caroline alone
expressed regret that she had not set eyes on him from the day she
became a wife.

“How could we, dear?” the Countess pathetically asked, under drowning
lids.

“Papa did not wish it,” sobbed Mrs. Andrew.

“I never shall forgive myself!” said the wife of the Major, drying her
cheeks. Perhaps it was not herself whom she felt she never could
forgive.

Ah! the man their father was! Incomparable Melchisedec! he might well
be called. So generous! so lordly! When the rain of tears would subside
for a moment, one would relate an anecdote or childish reminiscence of
him, and provoke a more violent outburst.

“Never, among the nobles of any land, never have I seen one like him!”
exclaimed the Countess, and immediately requested Harriet to tell her
how it would be possible to stop Andrew’s tongue in Silva’s presence.

“At present, you know, my dear, they may talk as much as they like—they
can’t understand one another one bit.”

Mrs. Cogglesby comforted her by the assurance that Andrew had received
an intimation of her wish for silence everywhere and toward everybody;
and that he might be reckoned upon to respect it, without demanding a
reason for the restriction. In other days Caroline and Louisa had a
little looked down on Harriet’s alliance with a dumpy man—a brewer—and
had always kind Christian compassion for him if his name were
mentioned. They seemed now, by their silence, to have a happier
estimate of Andrew’s qualities.

While the three sisters sat mingling their sorrows and alarms, their
young brother was making his way to the house. As he knocked at the
door he heard his name pronounced behind him, and had no difficulty in
recognizing the worthy brewer.

“What, Van, my boy! how are you? Quite a foreigner! By George, what a
hat!”

Mr. Andrew bounced back two or three steps to regard the dusky
sombrero.

“How do you do, sir?” said Evan.

“Sir to you!” Mr. Andrew briskly replied. “Don’t they teach you to give
your fist in Portugal, eh? I’ll ‘sir’ you. Wait till I’m Sir Andrew,
and then ‘sir’ away. You do speak English still, Van, eh? Quite jolly,
my boy?”

Mr. Andrew rubbed his hands to express that state in himself. Suddenly
he stopped, blinked queerly at Evan, grew pensive, and said, “Bless my
soul! I forgot.”

The door opened, Mr. Andrew took Evan’s arm, murmured a “hush!” and
trod gently along the passage to his library.

“We’re safe here,” he said. “There—there’s something the matter
up-stairs. The women are upset about something. Harriet—” Mr. Andrew
hesitated, and branched off: “You’ve heard we’ve got a new baby?”

Evan congratulated him; but another inquiry was in Mr. Andrew’s aspect,
and Evan’s calm, sad manner answered it.

“Yes,”—Mr. Andrew shook his head dolefully—“a splendid little chap! a
rare little chap! a we can’t help these things, Van! They will happen.
Sit down, my boy.”

Mr. Andrew again interrogated Evan with his eyes.

“My father is dead,” said Evan.

“Yes!” Mr. Andrew nodded, and glanced quickly at the ceiling, as if to
make sure that none listened overhead. “My parliamentary duties will
soon be over for the season,” he added, aloud; pursuing, in an
under-breath:

“Going down to-night, Van?”

“He is to be buried to-morrow,” said Evan.

“Then, of course, you go. Yes: quite right. Love your father and
mother! always love your father and mother! Old Tom and I never knew
ours. Tom’s quite well-same as ever. I’ll,” he rang the bell, “have my
chop in here with you. You must try and eat a bit, Van. Here we are,
and there we go. Old Tom’s wandering for one of his weeks. You’ll see
him some day. He ain’t like me. No dinner to-day, I suppose, Charles?”

This was addressed to the footman. He announced:

“Dinner to-day at half-past six, as usual, sir,” bowed, and retired.

Mr. Andrew pored on the floor, and rubbed his hair back on his head.
“An odd world!” was his remark.

Evan lifted up his face to sigh: “I’m almost sick of it!”

“Damn appearances!” cried Mr. Andrew, jumping on his legs.

The action cooled him.

“I’m sorry I swore,” he said. “Bad habit! The Major’s here—you know
that?” and he assumed the Major’s voice, and strutted in imitation of
the stalwart marine. “Major—a—Strike! of the Royal Marines! returned
from China! covered with glory!—a hero, Van! We can’t expect him to be
much of a mourner. And we shan’t have him to dine with us to-day—that’s
something.” He sank his voice: “I hope the widow’ll bear it.”

“I hope to God my mother is well!” Evan groaned.

“That’ll do,” said Mr. Andrew. “Don’t say any more.”

As he spoke, he clapped Evan kindly on the back.

A message was brought from the ladies, requiring Evan to wait on them.
He returned after some minutes.

“How do you think Harriet’s looking?” asked Mr. Andrew. And, not
waiting for an answer, whispered,

“Are they going down to the funeral, my boy?”

Evan’s brow was dark, as he replied: “They are not decided.”

“Won’t Harriet go?”

“She is not going—she thinks not.”

“And the Countess—Louisa’s upstairs, eh?—will she go?”

“She cannot leave the Count—she thinks not.”

“Won’t Caroline go? Caroline can go. She—he—I mean—Caroline can go?”

“The Major objects. She wishes to.”

Mr. Andrew struck out his arm, and uttered, “the Major!”—a compromise
for a loud anathema. But the compromise was vain, for he sinned again
in an explosion against appearances.

“I’m a brewer, Van. Do you think I’m ashamed of it? Not while I brew
good beer, my boy!—not while I brew good beer! They don’t think worse
of me in the House for it. It isn’t ungentlemanly to brew good beer,
Van. But what’s the use of talking?”

Mr. Andrew sat down, and murmured, “Poor girl! poor girl!”

The allusion was to his wife; for presently he said: “I can’t see why
Harriet can’t go. What’s to prevent her?”

Evan gazed at him steadily. Death’s levelling influence was in Evan’s
mind. He was ready to say why, and fully.

Mr. Andrew arrested him with a sharp “Never mind! Harriet does as she
likes. I’m accustomed to—hem! what she does is best, after all. She
doesn’t interfere with my business, nor I with hers. Man and wife.”

Pausing a moment or so, Mr. Andrew intimated that they had better be
dressing for dinner. With his hand on the door, which he kept closed,
he said, in a businesslike way, “You know, Van, as for me, I should be
very willing—only too happy—to go down and pay all the respect I
could.” He became confused, and shot his head from side to side,
looking anywhere but at Evan. “Happy now and to-morrow, to do anything
in my power, if Harriet—follow the funeral—one of the family—anything I
could do: but—a—we’d better be dressing for dinner.” And out the
enigmatic little man went.

Evan partly divined him then. But at dinner his behaviour was
perplexing. He was too cheerful. He pledged the Count. He would have
the Portuguese for this and that, and make Anglican efforts to repeat
it, and laugh at his failures. He would not see that there was a father
dead. At a table of actors, Mr. Andrew overdid his part, and was the
worst. His wife could not help thinking him a heartless little man.

The poor show had its term. The ladies fled to the boudoir sacred to
grief. Evan was whispered that he was to join them when he might,
without seeming mysterious to the Count. Before he reached them, they
had talked tearfully over the clothes he should wear at Lymport,
agreeing that his present foreign apparel, being black, would be
suitable, and would serve almost as disguise, to the inhabitants at
large; and as Evan had no English wear, and there was no time to
procure any for him, that was well. They arranged exactly how long he
should stay at Lymport, whom he should visit, the manner he should
adopt toward the different inhabitants. By all means he was to avoid
the approach of the gentry. For hours Evan, in a trance, half
stupefied, had to listen to the Countess’s directions how he was to
comport himself in Lymport.

“Show that you have descended among them, dear Van, but are not of
them. Our beautiful noble English poet expresses it so. You have come
to pay the last mortal duties, which they will respect, if they are not
brutes, and attempt no familiarities. Allow none: gently, but firmly.
Imitate Silva. You remember, at Dona Risbonda’s ball? When he met the
Comte de Dartigues, and knew he was to be in disgrace with his Court on
the morrow? Oh! the exquisite shade of difference in Silva’s behaviour
towards the Comte. So finely, delicately perceptible to the Comte, and
not a soul saw it but that wretched Frenchman! He came to me: ‘Madame,’
he said, ‘is a question permitted?’ I replied, ‘As many as you please,
M. le Comte, but no answers promised.’ He said: ‘May I ask if the
Courier has yet come in?’—‘Nay, M. le Comte,’ I replied, ‘this is
diplomacy. Inquire of me, or better, give me an opinion on the new
glacé silk from Paris.’—‘Madame,’ said he, bowing, ‘I hope Paris may
send me aught so good, or that I shall grace half so well.’ I smiled,
‘You shall not be single in your hopes, M. le Comte. The gift would be
base that you did not embellish.’ He lifted his hands, French-fashion:
‘Madame, it is that I have received the gift.’—‘Indeed! M. le
Comte.’—‘Even now from the Count de Saldar, your husband.’ I looked
most innocently, ‘From my husband, M. le Comte?’—‘From him, Madame. A
portrait. An Ambassador without his coat! The portrait was a finished
performance.’ I said: ‘And may one beg the permission to inspect
it?’—‘Mais,’ said he, laughing: ‘were it you alone, it would be a
privilege to me.’ I had to check him. ‘Believe me, M. le Comte, that
when I look upon it, my praise of the artist will be extinguished by my
pity for the subject.’ He should have stopped there; but you cannot
have the last word with a Frenchman—not even a woman. Fortunately the
Queen just then made her entry into the saloon, and his mot on the
charity of our sex was lost. We bowed mutually, and were separated.”
(The Countess employed her handkerchief.) “Yes, dear Van! that is how
you should behave. Imply things. With dearest Mama, of course, you are
the dutiful son. Alas! you must stand for son and daughters. Mama has
so much sense! She will understand how sadly we are placed. But in a
week I will come to her for a day, and bring you back.”

So much his sister Louisa. His sister Harriet offered him her house for
a home in London, thence to project his new career. His sister Caroline
sought a word with him in private, but only to weep bitterly in his
arms, and utter a faint moan of regret at marriages in general. He
loved this beautiful creature the best of his three sisters (partly, it
may be, because he despised her superior officer), and tried with a few
smothered words to induce her to accompany him: but she only shook her
fair locks and moaned afresh. Mr. Andrew, in the farewell squeeze of
the hand at the street-door, asked him if he wanted anything. He
negatived the requirement of anything whatever, with an air of careless
decision, though he was aware that his purse barely contained more than
would take him the distance, but the instincts of this amateur
gentleman were very fine and sensitive on questions of money. His
family had never known him beg for a shilling, or admit his necessity
for a penny: nor could he be made to accept money unless it was thrust
into his pocket. Somehow his sisters had forgotten this peculiarity of
his. Harriet only remembered it when too late.

“But I dare say Andrew has supplied him,” she said.

Andrew being interrogated, informed her what had passed between them.

“And you think a Harrington would confess he wanted money!” was her
scornful exclamation. “Evan would walk—he would die rather. It was
treating him like a mendicant.”

Andrew had to shrink in his brewer’s skin.

By some fatality all who were doomed to sit and listen to the Countess
de Saldar, were sure to be behindhand in an appointment.

When the young man arrived at the coach-office, he was politely
informed that the vehicle, in which a seat had been secured for him,
was in close alliance with time and tide, and being under the same
rigid laws, could not possibly have waited for him, albeit it had
stretched a point to the extent of a pair of minutes, at the urgent
solicitation of a passenger.

“A gentleman who speaks so, sir,” said a volunteer mimic of the office,
crowing and questioning from his throat in Goren’s manner. “Yok! yok!
That was how he spoke, sir.”

Evan reddened, for it brought the scene on board the Jocasta vividly to
his mind. The heavier business obliterated it. He took counsel with the
clerks of the office, and eventually the volunteer mimic conducted him
to certain livery stables, where Evan, like one accustomed to command,
ordered a chariot to pursue the coach, received a touch of the hat for
a lordly fee, and was soon rolling out of London.




CHAPTER VI.
MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD


The postillion had every reason to believe that he carried a real
gentleman behind him; in other words, a purse long and liberal. He
judged by all the points he knew of: a firm voice, a brief commanding
style, an apparent indifference to expense, and the inexplicable minor
characteristics, such as polished boots, and a striking wristband, and
so forth, which will show a creature accustomed to step over the heads
of men. He had, therefore, no particular anxiety to part company, and
jogged easily on the white highway, beneath a moon that walked high and
small over marble clouds.

Evan reclined in the chariot, revolving his sensations. In another mood
he would have called, them thoughts, perhaps, and marvelled at their
immensity. The theme was Love and Death. One might have supposed, from
his occasional mutterings at the pace regulated by the postillion, that
he was burning with anxiety to catch the flying coach. He had forgotten
it: forgotten that he was giving chase to anything. A pair of wondering
feminine eyes pursued him, and made him fret for the miles to throw a
thicker veil between him and them. The serious level brows of Rose
haunted the poor youth; and reflecting whither he was tending, and to
what sight, he had shadowy touches of the holiness there is in death,
from which came a conflict between the imaged phantoms of his father
and of Rose, and he sided against his love with some bitterness. His
sisters, weeping for their father and holding aloof from his ashes,
Evan swept from his mind. He called up the man his father was: the
kindliness, the readiness, the gallant gaiety of the great Mel. Youths
are fascinated by the barbarian virtues; and to Evan, under present
influences, his father was a pattern of manhood. He asked himself: Was
it infamous to earn one’s bread? and answered it very strongly in his
father’s favour. The great Mel’s creditors were not by to show him
another feature of the case.

Hitherto, in passive obedience to the indoctrination of the Countess,
Evan had looked on tailors as the proscribed race of modern society. He
had pitied his father as a man superior to his fate; but despite the
fitfully honest promptings with Rose (tempting to him because of the
wondrous chivalry they argued, and at bottom false probably as the
hypocrisy they affected to combat), he had been by no means sorry that
the world saw not the spot on himself. Other sensations beset him now.
Since such a man was banned by the world, which was to be despised?

The clear result of Evan’s solitary musing was to cast a sort of halo
over Tailordom. Death stood over the pale dead man, his father, and
dared the world to sneer at him. By a singular caprice of fancy, Evan
had no sooner grasped this image, than it was suggested that he might
as well inspect his purse, and see how much money he was master of.

Are you impatient with this young man? He has little character for the
moment. Most youths are like Pope’s women; they have no character at
all. And indeed a character that does not wait for circumstances to
shape it, is of small worth in the race that must be run. To be set too
early, is to take the work out of the hands of the Sculptor who
fashions men. Happily a youth is always at school, and if he was shut
up and without mark two or three hours ago, he will have something to
show you now: as I have seen blooming seaflowers and other graduated
organisms, when left undisturbed to their own action. Where the Fates
have designed that he shall present his figure in a story, this is sure
to happen.

To the postillion Evan was indebted for one of his first lessons.

About an hour after midnight pastoral stillness and the moon begat in
the postillion desire for a pipe. Daylight prohibits the dream of it to
mounted postillions. At night the question is more human, and allows
appeal. The moon smiles assentingly, and smokers know that she really
lends herself to the enjoyment of tobacco.

The postillion could remember gentlemen who did not object: who had
even given him cigars. Turning round to see if haply the present inmate
of the chariot might be smoking, he observed a head extended from the
window.

“How far are we?” was inquired.

The postillion numbered the milestones passed.

“Do you see anything of the coach?”

“Can’t say as I do, sir.”

He was commanded to stop. Evan jumped out.

“I don’t think I’ll take you any farther,” he said.

The postillion laughed to scorn the notion of his caring how far he
went. With a pipe in his mouth, he insinuatingly remarked, he could jog
on all night, and throw sleep to the dogs. Fresh horses at Hillford;
fresh at Fallowfield: and the gentleman himself would reach Lymport
fresh in the morning.

“No, no; I won’t take you any farther,” Evan repeated.

“But what do it matter, sir?” urged the postillion.

“I’d rather go on as I am. I—a—made no arrangement to take you the
whole way.”

“Oh!” cried the postillion, “don’t you go troublin’ yourself about
that, sir. Master knows it’s touch-and-go about catchin’ the coach. I’m
all right.”

So infatuated was the fellow in the belief that he was dealing with a
perfect gentleman—an easy pocket!

Now you would not suppose that one who presumes he has sufficient,
would find a difficulty in asking how much he has to pay. With an
effort, indifferently masked, Evan blurted:

“By the way, tell me—how much—what is the charge for the distance we’ve
come?”

There are gentlemen-screws: there are conscientious gentlemen. They
calculate, and remonstrating or not, they pay. The postillion would
rather have had to do with the gentleman royal, who is above base
computation; but he knew the humanity in the class he served, and with
his conception of Evan only partially dimmed, he remarked:

“Oh-h-h! that won’t hurt you, sir. Jump along in,—settle that
by-and-by.”

But when my gentleman stood fast, and renewed the demand to know the
exact charge for the distance already traversed, the postillion
dismounted, glanced him over, and speculated with his fingers tipping
up his hat. Meantime Evan drew out his purse, a long one, certainly,
but limp. Out of this drowned-looking wretch the last spark of life was
taken by the sum the postillion ventured to name; and if paying your
utmost farthing without examination of the charge, and cheerfully
stepping out to walk fifty miles, penniless, constituted a postillion’s
gentleman, Evan would have passed the test. The sight of poverty,
however, provokes familiar feelings in poor men, if you have not had
occasion to show them you possess particular qualities. The
postillion’s eye was more on the purse than on the sum it surrendered.

“There,” said Evan, “I shall walk. Good night.” And he flung his cloak
to step forward.

“Stop a bit, sir!” arrested him.

The postillion rallied up sideways, with an assumption of genial
respect. “I didn’t calc’late myself in that there amount.”

Were these words, think you, of a character to strike a young man hard
on the breast, send the blood to his head, and set up in his heart a
derisive chorus? My gentleman could pay his money, and keep his footing
gallantly; but to be asked for a penny beyond what he possessed; to be
seen beggared, and to be claimed a debtor-aleck! Pride was the one
developed faculty of Evan’s nature. The Fates who mould us, always work
from the main-spring. I will not say that the postillion stripped off
the mask for him, at that instant completely; but he gave him the first
true glimpse of his condition. From the vague sense of being an
impostor, Evan awoke to the clear fact that he was likewise a fool.

It was impossible for him to deny the man’s claim, and he would not
have done it, if he could. Acceding tacitly, he squeezed the ends of
his purse in his pocket, and with a “Let me see,” tried his waistcoat.
Not too impetuously; for he was careful of betraying the horrid
emptiness till he was certain that the powers who wait on gentlemen had
utterly forsaken him. They had not. He discovered a small coin, under
ordinary circumstances not contemptible; but he did not stay to
reflect, and was guilty of the error of offering it to the postillion.

The latter peered at it in the centre of his palm; gazed queerly in the
gentleman’s face, and then lifting the spit of silver for the disdain
of his mistress, the moon, he drew a long breath of regret at the
original mistake he had committed, and said:

“That’s what you’re goin’ to give me for my night’s work?”

The powers who wait on gentlemen had only helped the pretending youth
to try him. A rejection of the demand would have been infinitely wiser
and better than this paltry compromise. The postillion would have
fought it: he would not have despised his fare.

How much it cost the poor pretender to reply, “It’s the last farthing I
have, my man,” the postillion could not know.

“A scabby sixpence?” The postillion continued his question.

“You heard what I said,” Evan remarked.

The postillion drew another deep breath, and holding out the coin at
arm’s length:

“Well, sir!” he observed, as one whom mental conflict has brought to
the philosophy of the case, “now, was we to change places, I couldn’t
a’ done it! I couldn’t a’ done it!” he reiterated, pausing
emphatically.

“Take it, sir!” he magnanimously resumed; “take it! You rides when you
can, and you walks when you must. Lord forbid I should rob such a
gentleman as you!”

One who feels a death, is for the hour lifted above the satire of
postillions. A good genius prompted Evan to avoid the silly squabble
that might have ensued and made him ridiculous. He took the money,
quietly saying, “Thank you.”

Not to lose his vantage, the postillion, though a little staggered by
the move, rejoined: “Don’t mention it.”

Evan then said: “Good night, my man. I won’t wish, for your sake, that
we changed places. You would have to walk fifty miles to be in time for
your father’s funeral. Good night.”

“You are it to look at!” was the postillion’s comment, seeing my
gentleman depart with great strides. He did not speak offensively;
rather, it seemed, to appease his conscience for the original mistake
he had committed, for subsequently came, “My oath on it, I don’t get
took in again by a squash hat in a hurry!”

Unaware of the ban he had, by a sixpenny stamp, put upon an unoffending
class, Evan went ahead, hearing the wheels of the chariot still
dragging the road in his rear. The postillion was in a dissatisfied
state of mind. He had asked and received more than his due. But in the
matter of his sweet self, he had been choused, as he termed it. And my
gentleman had baffled him, he could not quite tell how; but he had been
got the better of; his sarcasms had not stuck, and returned to rankle
in the bosom of their author. As a Jew, therefore, may eye an erewhile
bondsman who has paid the bill, but stands out against excess of
interest on legal grounds, the postillion regarded Evan, of whom he was
now abreast, eager for a controversy.

“Fine night,” said the postillion, to begin, and was answered by a
short assent. “Lateish for a poor man to be out—don’t you think sir,
eh?”

“I ought to think so,” said Evan, mastering the shrewd unpleasantness
he felt in the colloquy forced on him.

“Oh, you! you’re a gentleman!” the postillion ejaculated.

“You see I have no money.”

“Feel it, too, sir.”

“I am sorry you should be the victim.”

“Victim!” the postillion seized on an objectionable word. “I ain’t no
victim, unless you was up to a joke with me, sir, just now. Was that
the game?”

Evan informed him that he never played jokes with money, or on men.

“Cause it looks like it, sir, to go to offer a poor chap sixpence.” The
postillion laughed hollow from the end of his lungs. “Sixpence for a
night’s work! It is a joke, if you don’t mean it for one. Why, do you
know, sir, I could go—there, I don’t care where it is!—I could go
before any magistrate livin’, and he’d make ye pay. It’s a charge, as
custom is, and he’d make ye pay. Or p’rhaps you’re a goin’ on my
generosity, and’ll say, he gev back that sixpence! Well! I shouldn’t a’
thought a gentleman’d make that his defence before a magistrate. But
there, my man! if it makes ye happy, keep it. But you take my advice,
sir. When you hires a chariot, see you’ve got the shiners. And don’t
you go never again offerin’ a sixpence to a poor man for a night’s
work. They don’t like it. It hurts their feelin’s. Don’t you forget
that, sir. Lay that up in your mind.”

Now the postillion having thus relieved himself, jeeringly asked
permission to smoke a pipe. To which Evan said, “Pray, smoke, if it
pleases you.” And the postillion, hardly mollified, added, “The baccy’s
paid for,” and smoked.

As will sometimes happen, the feelings of the man who had spoken out
and behaved doubtfully, grew gentle and Christian, whereas those of the
man whose bearing under the trial had been irreproachable were much the
reverse. The postillion smoked—he was a lord on his horse; he beheld my
gentleman trudging in the dust. Awhile he enjoyed the contrast,
dividing his attention between the footfarer and moon. To have had the
last word is always a great thing; and to have given my gentleman a
lecture, because he shunned a dispute, also counts. And then there was
the poor young fellow trudging to his father’s funeral! The postillion
chose to remember that now. In reality, he allowed, he had not very
much to complain of, and my gentleman’s courteous avoidance of
provocation (the apparent fact that he, the postillion, had humbled him
and got the better of him, equally, it may be), acted on his fine
English spirit. I should not like to leave out the tobacco in this good
change that was wrought in him. However, he presently astonished Evan
by pulling up his horses, and crying that he was on his way to Hillford
to bait, and saw no reason why he should not take a lift that part of
the road, at all events. Evan thanked him briefly, but declined, and
paced on with his head bent.

“It won’t cost you nothing—not a sixpence!” the postillion sang out,
pursuing him. “Come, sir! be a man! I ain’t a hintin’ at anything—jump
in.”

Evan again declined, and looked out for a side path to escape the
fellow, whose bounty was worse to him than his abuse, and whose mention
of the sixpence was unlucky.

“Dash it!” cried the postillion, “you’re going down to a funeral—I
think you said your father’s, sir—you may as well try and get there
respectable—as far as I go. It’s one to me whether you’re in or out;
the horses won’t feel it, and I do wish you’d take a lift and welcome.
It’s because you’re too much of a gentleman to be beholden to a poor
man, I suppose!”

Evan’s young pride may have had a little of that base mixture in it,
and certainly he would have preferred that the invitation had not been
made to him; but he was capable of appreciating what the rejection of a
piece of friendliness involved, and as he saw that the man was sincere,
he did violence to himself, and said: “Very well; then I’ll jump in.”

The postillion was off his horse in a twinkling, and trotted his bandy
legs to undo the door, as to a gentleman who paid. This act of service
Evan valued.

“Suppose I were to ask you to take the sixpence now?” he said, turning
round, with one foot on the step.

“Well, sir,” the postillion sent his hat aside to answer. “I don’t want
it—I’d rather not have it; but there! I’ll take it—dash the sixpence!
and we’ll cry quits.”

Evan, surprised and pleased with him, dropped the bit of money in his
hand, saying: “It will fill a pipe for you. While you’re smoking it,
think of me as in your debt. You’re the only man I ever owed a penny
to.”

The postillion put it in a side pocket apart, and observed: “A sixpence
kindly meant is worth any crown-piece that’s grudged—that it is! In you
jump, sir. It’s a jolly night!”

Thus may one, not a conscious sage, play the right tune on this human
nature of ours: by forbearance, put it in the wrong; and then, by not
refusing the burden of an obligation, confer something better. The
instrument is simpler than we are taught to fancy. But it was doubtless
owing to a strong emotion in his soul, as well as to the stuff he was
made of, that the youth behaved as he did. We are now and then above
our own actions; seldom on a level with them. Evan, I dare say, was
long in learning to draw any gratification from the fact that he had
achieved without money the unparalleled conquest of a man. Perhaps he
never knew what immediate influence on his fortune this episode
effected.

At Hillford they went their different ways. The postillion wished him
good speed, and Evan shook his hand. He did so rather abruptly, for the
postillion was fumbling at his pocket, and evidently rounding about a
proposal in his mind.

My gentleman has now the road to himself. Money is the clothing of a
gentleman: he may wear it well or ill. Some, you will mark, carry great
quantities of it gracefully: some, with a stinted supply, present a
decent appearance: very few, I imagine, will bear inspection, who are
absolutely stripped of it. All, save the shameless, are toiling to
escape that trial. My gentleman, treading the white highway across the
solitary heaths, that swell far and wide to the moon, is, by the
postillion, who has seen him, pronounced no sham. Nor do I think the
opinion of any man worthless, who has had the postillion’s authority
for speaking. But it is, I am told, a finer test to embellish much
gentleman-apparel, than to walk with dignity totally unadorned. This
simply tries the soundness of our faculties: that tempts them in
erratic directions. It is the difference between active and passive
excellence. As there is hardly any situation, however, so interesting
to reflect upon as that of a man without a penny in his pocket, and a
gizzard full of pride, we will leave Mr. Evan Harrington to what fresh
adventures may befall him, walking toward the funeral plumes of the
firs, under the soft midsummer flush, westward, where his father lies.




CHAPTER VII.
MOTHER AND SON


Rare as epic song is the man who is thorough in what he does. And
happily so; for in life he subjugates us, and he makes us bondsmen to
his ashes. It was in the order of things that the great Mel should be
borne to his final resting-place by a troop of creditors. You have seen
(since the occasion demands a pompous simile) clouds that all day cling
about the sun, and, in seeking to obscure him, are compelled to blaze
in his livery at fall of night they break from him illumined, hang
mournfully above him, and wear his natural glories long after he is
gone. Thus, then, these worthy fellows, faithful to him to the dust,
fulfilled Mel’s triumphant passage amongst them, and closed his career.

To regale them when they returned, Mrs. Mel, whose mind was not intent
on greatness, was occupied in spreading meat and wine. Mrs. Fiske
assisted her, as well as she could, seeing that one hand was entirely
engaged by her handkerchief. She had already stumbled, and dropped a
glass, which had brought on her sharp condemnation from her aunt, who
bade her sit down, or go upstairs to have her cry out, and then return
to be serviceable.

“Oh! I can’t help it!” sobbed Mrs. Fiske. “That he should be carried
away, and none of his children to see him the last time! I can
understand Louisa—and Harriet, too, perhaps? But why could not
Caroline? And that they should be too fine ladies to let their brother
come and bury his father. Oh! it does seem——”

Mrs. Fiske fell into a chair, and surrendered to grief.

“Where is the cold tongue?” said Mrs. Mel to Sally, the maid, in a
brief under-voice.

“Please mum, Jacko——!”

“He must be whipped. You are a careless slut.”

“Please, I can’t think of everybody and everything, and poor master——”

Sally plumped on a seat, and took sanctuary under her apron. Mrs. Mel
glanced at the pair, continuing her labour.

“Oh, aunt, aunt!” cried Mrs. Fiske, “why didn’t you put it off for
another day, to give Evan a chance?”

“Master’d have kept another two days, he would!” whimpered Sally.

“Oh, aunt! to think!” cried Mrs. Fiske.

“And his coffin not bearin’ of his spurs!” whimpered Sally.

Mrs. Mel interrupted them by commanding Sally to go to the
drawing-room, and ask a lady there, of the name of Mrs. Wishaw, whether
she would like to have some lunch sent up to her. Mrs. Fiske was
requested to put towels in Evan’s bedroom.

“Yes, aunt, if you’re not infatuated!” said Mrs. Fiske, as she prepared
to obey; while Sally, seeing that her public exhibition of sorrow and
sympathy could be indulged but an instant longer, unwound herself for a
violent paroxysm, blurting between stops:

“If he’d ony’ve gone to his last bed comfortable!... If he’d ony’ve
been that decent as not for to go to his last bed with his clothes on!
... If he’d ony’ve had a comfortable sheet!... It makes a woman feel
cold to think of him full dressed there, as if he was goin’ to be a
soldier on the Day o’ Judgement!”

To let people speak was a maxim of Mrs. Mel’s, and a wise one for any
form of society when emotions are very much on the surface. She
continued her arrangements quietly, and, having counted the number of
plates and glasses, and told off the guests on her fingers, she, sat
down to await them.

The first one who entered the room was her son.

“You have come,” said Mrs. Mel, flushing slightly, but otherwise
outwardly calm.

“You didn’t suppose I should stay away from you, mother?”

Evan kissed her cheek.

“I knew you would not.”

Mrs. Mel examined him with those eyes of hers that compassed objects in
a single glance. She drew her finger on each side of her upper lip, and
half smiled, saying:

“That won’t do here.”

“What?” asked Evan, and proceeded immediately to make inquiries about
her health, which she satisfied with a nod.

“You saw him lowered, Van?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Then go and wash yourself, for you are dirty, and then come and take
your place at the head of the table.”

“Must I sit here, mother?”

“Without a doubt—you must. You know your room. Quick!”

In this manner their first interview passed.

Mrs. Fiske rushed in to exclaim:

“So, you were right, aunt—he has come. I met him on the stairs. Oh! how
like dear uncle Mel he looks, in the militia, with that moustache. I
just remember him as a child; and, oh, what a gentleman he is!”

At the end of the sentence Mrs. Mel’s face suddenly darkened: she said,
in a deep voice:

“Don’t dare to talk that nonsense before him, Ann.”

Mrs. Fiske looked astonished.

“What have I done, aunt?”

“He shan’t be ruined by a parcel of fools,” said Mrs. Mel. “There, go!
Women have no place here.”

“How the wretches can force themselves to touch a morsel, after this
morning!” Mrs. Fiske exclaimed, glancing at the table.

“Men must eat,” said Mrs. Mel.

The mourners were heard gathering outside the door. Mrs. Fiske escaped
into the kitchen. Mrs. Mel admitted them into the parlour, bowing much
above the level of many of the heads that passed her.

Assembled were Messrs. Barnes, Kilne, and Grossby, whom we know; Mr.
Doubleday, the ironmonger; Mr. Joyce, the grocer; Mr. Perkins, commonly
called Lawyer Perkins; Mr. Welbeck, the pier-master of Lymport;
Bartholomew Fiske; Mr. Coxwell, a Fallowfield maltster, brewer, and
farmer; creditors of various dimensions, all of them. Mr. Goren coming
last, behind his spectacles.

“My son will be with you directly, to preside,” said Mrs. Mel. “Accept
my thanks for the respect you have shown my husband. I wish you good
morning.”

“Morning, ma’am,” answered several voices, and Mrs. Mel retired.

The mourners then set to work to relieve their hats of the appendages
of crape. An undertaker’s man took possession of the long black cloaks.
The gloves were generally pocketed.

“That’s my second black pair this year,” said Joyce.

“They’ll last a time to come. I don’t need to buy gloves while
neighbours pop off.”

“Undertakers’ gloves seem to me as if they’re made for mutton fists,”
remarked Welbeck; upon which Kilne nudged Barnes, the butcher, with a
sharp “Aha!” and Barnes observed:

“Oh! I never wear ’em—they does for my boys on Sundays. I smoke a pipe
at home.”

The Fallowfield farmer held his length of crape aloft and inquired:
“What shall do with this?”

“Oh, you keep it,” said one or two.

Coxwell rubbed his chin. “Don’t like to rob the widder.”

“What’s left goes to the undertaker?” asked Grossby.

“To be sure,” said Barnes; and Kilne added: “It’s a job”: Lawyer
Perkins ejaculating confidently, “Perquisites of office, gentlemen;
perquisites of office!” which settled the dispute and appeased every
conscience.

A survey of the table ensued. The mourners felt hunger, or else thirst;
but had not, it appeared, amalgamated the two appetites as yet. Thirst
was the predominant declaration; and Grossby, after an examination of
the decanters, unctuously deduced the fact, which he announced, that
port and sherry were present.

“Try the port,” said Kilne.

“Good?” Barnes inquired.

A very intelligent “I ought to know,” with a reserve of regret at the
extension of his intimacy with the particular vintage under that roof,
was winked by Kilne.

Lawyer Perkins touched the arm of a mourner about to be experimental on
Kilne’s port—

“I think we had better wait till young Mr. Harrington takes the table,
don’t you see?”

“Yes,-ah!” croaked Goren. “The head of the family, as the saying goes!”

“I suppose we shan’t go into business to-day?” Joyce carelessly
observed.

Lawyer Perkins answered:

“No. You can’t expect it. Mr. Harrington has led me to anticipate that
he will appoint a day. Don’t you see?”

“Oh! I see,” returned Joyce. “I ain’t in such a hurry. What’s he
doing?”

Doubleday, whose propensities were waggish, suggested “shaving,” but
half ashamed of it, since the joke missed, fell to as if he were
soaping his face, and had some trouble to contract his jaw.

The delay in Evan’s attendance on the guests of the house was caused by
the fact that Mrs. Mel had lain in wait for him descending, to warn him
that he must treat them with no supercilious civility, and to tell him
partly the reason why. On hearing the potential relations in which they
stood toward the estate of his father, Evan hastily and with the
assurance of a son of fortune, said they should be paid.

“That’s what they would like to hear,” said Mrs. Mel. “You may just
mention it when they’re going to leave. Say you will fix a day to meet
them.”

“Every farthing!” pursued Evan, on whom the tidings were beginning to
operate. “What! debts? my poor father!”

“And a thumping sum, Van. You will open your eyes wider.”

“But it shall be paid, mother,—it shall be paid. Debts? I hate them.
I’d slave night and day to pay them.”

Mrs. Mel spoke in a more positive tense: “And so will I, Van. Now, go.”

It mattered little to her what sort of effect on his demeanour her
revelation produced, so long as the resolve she sought to bring him to
was nailed in his mind; and she was a woman to knock and knock again,
till it was firmly fixed there. With a strong purpose, and no plans,
there were few who could resist what, in her circle, she willed; not
even a youth who would gaily have marched to the scaffold rather than
stand behind a counter. A purpose wedded to plans may easily suffer
shipwreck; but an unfettered purpose that moulds circumstances as they
arise, masters us, and is terrible. Character melts to it, like metal
in the steady furnace. The projector of plots is but a miserable
gambler and votary of chances. Of a far higher quality is the will that
can subdue itself to wait, and lay no petty traps for opportunity.
Poets may fable of such a will, that it makes the very heavens conform
to it; or, I may add, what is almost equal thereto, one who would be a
gentleman, to consent to be a tailor. The only person who ever held in
his course against Mrs. Mel, was Mel,—her husband; but, with him, she
was under the physical fascination of her youth, and it never left her.
In her heart she barely blamed him. What he did, she took among other
inevitable matters.

The door closed upon Evan, and waiting at the foot, of the stairs a
minute to hear how he was received, Mrs. Mel went to the kitchen and
called the name of Dandy, which brought out an ill-built, low-browed,
small man, in a baggy suit of black, who hopped up to her with a surly
salute. Dandy was a bird Mrs. Mel had herself brought down, and she had
for him something of a sportsman’s regard for his victim. Dandy was the
cleaner of boots and runner of errands in the household of Melchisedec,
having originally entered it on a dark night by the cellar. Mrs. Mel,
on that occasion, was sleeping in her dressing-gown, to be ready to
give the gallant night-hawk, her husband, the service he might require
on his return to the nest. Hearing a suspicious noise below, she rose,
and deliberately loaded a pair of horse-pistols, weapons Mel had worn
in his holsters in the heroic days gone; and with these she stepped
downstairs straight to the cellar, carrying a lantern at her girdle.
She could not only load, but present and fire. Dandy was foremost in
stating that she called him forth steadily, three times, before the
pistol was discharged. He admitted that he was frightened, and
incapable of speech, at the apparition of the tall, terrific woman.
After the third time of asking he had the ball lodged in his leg and
fell. Mrs. Mel was in the habit of bearing heavier weights than Dandy.
She made no ado about lugging him to a chamber, where, with her own
hands (for this woman had some slight knowledge of surgery, and was
great in herbs and drugs) she dressed his wound, and put him to bed;
crying contempt (ever present in Dandy’s memory) at such a poor
creature undertaking the work of housebreaker. Taught that he really
was a poor creature for the work, Dandy, his nursing over, begged to be
allowed to stop and wait on Mrs. Mel; and she who had, like many strong
natures, a share of pity for the objects she despised, did not cast him
out. A jerk in his gait, owing to the bit of lead Mrs. Mel had dropped
into him, and a little, perhaps, to her self-satisfied essay in
surgical science on his person, earned him the name he went by.

When her neighbours remonstrated with her for housing a reprobate, Mrs.
Mel would say: “Dandy is well-fed and well-physicked: there’s no harm
in Dandy”; by which she may have meant that the food won his gratitude,
and the physic reduced his humours. She had observed human nature. At
any rate, Dandy was her creature; and the great Mel himself rallied her
about her squire.

“When were you drunk last?” was Mrs. Mel’s address to Dandy, as he
stood waiting for orders.

He replied to it in an altogether injured way:

“There, now; you’ve been and called me away from my dinner to ask me
that. Why, when I had the last chance, to be sure.”

“And you were at dinner in your new black suit?”

“Well,” growled Dandy, “I borrowed Sally’s apron. Seems I can’t please
ye.”

Mrs. Mel neither enjoined nor cared for outward forms of respect, where
she was sure of complete subserviency. If Dandy went beyond the limits,
she gave him an extra dose. Up to the limits he might talk as he
pleased, in accordance with Mrs. Mel’s maxim, that it was a necessary
relief to all talking creatures.

“Now, take off your apron,” she said, “and wash your hands, dirty pig,
and go and wait at table in there”; she pointed to the parlour-door:
“Come straight to me when everybody has left.”

“Well, there I am with the bottles again,” returned Dandy. “It’s your
fault this time, mind! I’ll come as straight as I can.”

Dandy turned away to perform her bidding, and Mrs. Mel ascended to the
drawing-room to sit with Mrs. Wishaw, who was, as she told all who
chose to hear, an old flame of Mel’s, and was besides, what Mrs. Mel
thought more of, the wife of Mel’s principal creditor, a wholesale
dealer in cloth, resident in London.

The conviviality of the mourners did not disturb the house. Still, men
who are not accustomed to see the colour of wine every day, will sit
and enjoy it, even upon solemn occasions, and the longer they sit the
more they forget the matter that has brought them together. Pleading
their wives and shops, however, they released Evan from his miserable
office late in the afternoon.

His mother came down to him,—and saying, “I see how you did the
journey—you walked it,” told him to follow her.

“Yes, mother,” Evan yawned, “I walked part of the way. I met a fellow
in a gig about ten miles out of Fallowfield, and he gave me a lift to
Flatsham. I just reached Lymport in time, thank Heaven! I wouldn’t have
missed that! By the way, I’ve satisfied these men.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Mel.

“They wanted—one or two of them—what a penance it is to have to sit
among those people an hour!—they wanted to ask me about the business,
but I silenced them. I told them to meet me here this day week.”

Mrs. Mel again said “Oh!” and, pushing into one of the upper rooms,
“Here’s your bedroom, Van, just as you left it.”

“Ah, so it is,” muttered Evan, eyeing a print. “The Douglas and the
Percy: ‘he took the dead man by the hand.’ What an age it seems since I
last saw that. There’s Sir Hugh Montgomery on horseback—he hasn’t
moved. Don’t you remember my father calling it the Battle of
Tit-for-Tat? Gallant Percy! I know he wished he had lived in those days
of knights and battles.”

“It does not much signify whom one has to make clothes for,” observed
Mrs. Mel. Her son happily did not mark her.

“I think we neither of us were made for the days of pence and pounds,”
he continued. “Now, mother, sit down, and talk to me about him. Did he
mention me? Did he give me his blessing? I hope he did not suffer. I’d
have given anything to press his hand,” and looking wistfully at the
Percy lifting the hand of Douglas dead, Evan’s eyes filled with big
tears.

“He suffered very little,” returned Mrs. Mel, “and his last words were
about you.”

“What were they?” Evan burst out.

“I will tell you another time. Now undress, and go to bed. When I talk
to you, Van, I want a cool head to listen. You do nothing but yawn
yard-measures.”

The mouth of the weary youth instinctively snapped short the abhorred
emblem.

“Here, I will help you, Van.”

In spite of his remonstrances and petitions for talk, she took off his
coat and waistcoat, contemptuously criticizing the cloth of foreign
tailors and their absurd cut.

“Have you heard from Louisa?” asked Evan.

“Yes, yes—about your sisters by-and-by. Now, be good, and go to bed.”

She still treated him like a boy, whom she was going to force to the
resolution of a man.

Dandy’s sleeping-room was on the same floor as Evan’s. Thither, when
she had quitted her son, she directed her steps. She had heard Dandy
tumble up-stairs the moment his duties were over, and knew what to
expect when the bottles had been in his way; for drink made Dandy
savage, and a terror to himself. It was her command to him that, when
he happened to come across liquor, he should immediately seek his
bedroom and bolt the door, and Dandy had got the habit of obeying her.
On this occasion he was vindictive against her, seeing that she had
delivered him over to his enemy with malice prepense. A good deal of
knocking, and summoning of Dandy by name, was required before she was
admitted, and the sight of her did not delight him, as he testified.

“I’m drunk!” he bawled. “Will that do for ye?”

Mrs. Mel stood with her two hands crossed above her apron-string,
noting his sullen lurking eye with the calm of a tamer of beasts.

“You go out of the room; I’m drunk!” Dandy repeated, and pitched
forward on the bed-post, in the middle of an oath.

She understood that it was pure kindness on Dandy’s part to bid her go
and be out of his reach; and therefore, on his becoming so abusive as
to be menacing, she, without a shade of anger, and in the most
unruffled manner, administered to him the remedy she had reserved, in
the shape of a smart box on the ear, which sent him flat to the floor.
He rose, after two or three efforts, quite subdued.

“Now, Dandy, sit on the edge of the bed.”

Dandy sat on the extreme edge, and Mrs. Mel pursued:

“Now, Dandy, tell me what your master said at the table.”

“Talked at ’em like a lord, he did,” said Dandy, stupidly consoling the
boxed ear.

“What were his words?”

Dandy’s peculiarity was, that he never remembered anything save when
drunk, and Mrs. Mel’s dose had rather sobered him. By degrees,
scratching at his head haltingly, he gave the context.

“‘Gentlemen, I hear for the first time, you’ve claims against my poor
father. Nobody shall ever say he died, and any man was the worse for
it. I’ll meet you next week, and I’ll bind myself by law. Here’s Lawyer
Perkins. No; Mr. Perkins. I’ll pay off every penny. Gentlemen, look
upon me as your debtor, and not my father.’”

Delivering this with tolerable steadiness, Dandy asked, “Will that do?”

“That will do,” said Mrs. Mel. “I’ll send you up some tea presently.
Lie down, Dandy.”

The house was dark and silent when Evan, refreshed by his rest,
descended to seek his mother. She was sitting alone in the parlour.
With a tenderness which Mrs. Mel permitted rather than encouraged, Evan
put his arm round her neck, and kissed her many times. One of the
symptoms of heavy sorrow, a longing for the signs of love, made Evan
fondle his mother, and bend over her yearningly. Mrs. Mel said once:
“Dear Van; good boy!” and quietly sat through his caresses.

“Sitting up for me, mother?” he whispered.

“Yes, Van; we may as well have our talk out.”

“Ah!” he took a chair close by her side, “tell me my father’s last
words.”

“He said he hoped you would never be a tailor.”

Evan’s forehead wrinkled up. “There’s not much fear of that, then!”

His mother turned her face on him, and examined him with a rigorous
placidity; all her features seeming to bear down on him. Evan did not
like the look.

“You object to trade, Van?”

“Yes, decidedly, mother—hate it; but that’s not what I want to talk to
you about. Didn’t my father speak of me much?”

“He desired that you should wear his militia sword, if you got a
commission.”

“I have rather given up hope of the Army,” said Evan.

Mrs. Mel requested him to tell her what a colonel’s full pay amounted
to; and again, the number of years it required, on a rough calculation,
to attain that grade. In reply to his statement she observed: “A tailor
might realize twice the sum in a quarter of the time.”

“What if he does—double, or treble?” cried Evan, impetuously; and to
avoid the theme, and cast off the bad impression it produced on him, he
rubbed his hands, and said: “I want to talk to you about my prospects,
mother.”

“What are they?” Mrs. Mel inquired.

The severity of her mien and sceptical coldness of her speech caused
him to inspect them suddenly, as if she had lent him her eyes. He put
them by, till the gold should recover its natural shine, saying: “By
the way, mother, I’ve written the half of a History of Portugal.”

“Have you?” said Mrs. Mel. “For Louisa?”

“No, mother, of course not: to sell it. Albuquerque! what a splendid
fellow he was!”

Informing him that he knew she abominated foreign names, she said: “And
your prospects are, writing Histories of Portugal?”

“No, mother. I was going to tell you, I expect a Government
appointment. Mr. Jocelyn likes my work—I think he likes me. You know, I
was his private secretary for ten months.”

“You write a good hand,” his mother interposed.

“And I’m certain I was born for diplomacy.”

“For an easy chair, and an ink-dish before you, and lacqueys behind.
What’s to be your income, Van?”

Evan carelessly remarked that he must wait and see.

“A very proper thing to do,” said Mrs. Mel; for now that she had fixed
him to some explanation of his prospects, she could condescend in her
stiff way to banter.

Slightly touched by it, Evan pursued, half laughing, as men do who wish
to propitiate common sense on behalf of what seems tolerably absurd:
“It’s not the immediate income, you know, mother: one thinks of one’s
future. In the diplomatic service, as Louisa says, you come to be known
to Ministers gradually, I mean. That is, they hear of you; and if you
show you have some capacity—Louisa wants me to throw it up in time, and
stand for Parliament. Andrew, she thinks, would be glad to help me to
his seat. Once in Parliament, and known to Ministers, you—your career
is open to you.”

In justice to Mr. Evan Harrington, it must be said, he built up this
extraordinary card-castle to dazzle his mother’s mind: he had lost his
right grasp of her character for the moment, because of an undefined
suspicion of something she intended, and which sent him himself to take
refuge in those flimsy structures; while the very altitude he reached
beguiled his imagination, and made him hope to impress hers.

Mrs. Mel dealt it one fillip. “And in the meantime how are you to live,
and pay the creditors?”

Though Evan answered cheerfully, “Oh, they will wait, and I can live on
anything,” he was nevertheless floundering on the ground amid the ruins
of the superb edifice; and his mother, upright and rigid, continuing,
“You can live on anything, and they will wait, and call your father a
rogue,” he started, grievously bitten by one of the serpents of earth.

“Good heaven, mother! what are you saying?”

“That they will call your father a rogue, and will have a right to,”
said the relentless woman.

“Not while I live!” Evan exclaimed.

“You may stop one mouth with your fist, but you won’t stop a dozen,
Van.”

Evan jumped up and walked the room.

“What am I to do?” he cried. “I will pay everything. I will bind myself
to pay every farthing. What more can I possibly do?”

“Make the money,” said Mrs. Mel’s deep voice.

Evan faced her: “My dear mother, you are very unjust and inconsiderate.
I have been working and doing my best. I promise—what do the debts
amount to?”

“Something like £5000 in all, Van.”

“Very well.” Youth is not alarmed by the sound of big sums. “Very
well—I will pay it.”

Evan looked as proud as if he had just clapped down the full amount on
the table.

“Out of the History of Portugal, half written, and the prospect of a
Government appointment?”

Mrs. Mel raised her eyelids to him.

“In time—in time, mother!”

“Mention your proposal to the creditors when you meet them this day
week,” she said.

Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Then Evan came close to her,
saying:

“What is it you want of me, mother?”

“I want nothing, Van—I can support myself.”

“But what would you have me do, mother?”

“Be honest; do your duty, and don’t be a fool about it.”

“I will try,” he rejoined. “You tell me to make the money. Where and
how can I make it? I am perfectly willing to work.”

“In this house,” said Mrs. Mel; and, as this was pretty clear speaking,
she stood up to lend her figure to it.

“Here?” faltered Evan. “What! be a ——”

“Tailor!” The word did not sting her tongue.

“I? Oh, that’s quite impossible!” said Evan. And visions of leprosy,
and Rose shrinking her skirts from contact with him, shadowed out and
away in his mind.

“Understand your choice!” Mrs. Mel imperiously spoke. “What are brains
given you for? To be played the fool with by idiots and women? You have
£5000 to pay to save your father from being called a rogue. You can
only make the money in one way, which is open to you. This business
might produce a thousand pounds a-year and more. In seven or eight
years you may clear your father’s name, and live better all the time
than many of your bankrupt gentlemen. You have told the creditors you
will pay them. Do you think they’re gaping fools, to be satisfied by a
History of Portugal? If you refuse to take the business at once, they
will sell me up, and quite right too. Understand your choice. There’s
Mr. Goren has promised to have you in London a couple of months, and
teach you what he can. He is a kind friend. Would any of your gentlemen
acquaintance do the like for you? Understand your choice. You will be a
beggar—the son of a rogue—or an honest man who has cleared his father’s
name!”

During this strenuously uttered allocution, Mrs. Mel, though her chest
heaved but faintly against her crossed hands, showed by the dilatation
of her eyes, and the light in them, that she felt her words. There is
that in the aspect of a fine frame breathing hard facts, which, to a
youth who has been tumbled headlong from his card-castles and airy
fabrics, is masterful, and like the pressure of a Fate. Evan drooped
his head.

“Now,” said Mrs. Mel, “you shall have some supper.”

Evan told her he could not eat.

“I insist upon your eating,” said Mrs. Mel; “empty stomachs are foul
counsellors.”

“Mother! do you want to drive me mad?” cried Evan.

She looked at him to see whether the string she held him by would bear
the slight additional strain: decided not to press a small point.

“Then go to bed and sleep on it,” she said—sure of him—and gave her
cheek for his kiss, for she never performed the operation, but kept her
mouth, as she remarked, for food and speech, and not for slobbering
mummeries.

Evan returned to his solitary room. He sat on the bed and tried to
think, oppressed by horrible sensations of self-contempt, that caused
whatever he touched to sicken him.

There were the Douglas and the Percy on the wall. It was a happy and a
glorious time, was it not, when men lent each other blows that killed
outright; when to be brave and cherish noble feelings brought honour;
when strength of arm and steadiness of heart won fortune; when the fair
stars of earth—sweet women—wakened and warmed the love of squires of
low degree. This legacy of the dead man’s hand! Evan would have paid it
with his blood; but to be in bondage all his days to it; through it to
lose all that was dear to him; to wear the length of a loathed
existence!—we should pardon a young man’s wretchedness at the prospect,
for it was in a time before our joyful era of universal equality. Yet
he never cast a shade of blame upon his father.

The hours moved on, and he found himself staring at his small candle,
which struggled more and more faintly with the morning light, like his
own flickering ambition against the facts of life.




CHAPTER VIII.
INTRODUCES AN ECCENTRIC


At the Aurora—one of those rare antiquated taverns, smelling of
comfortable time and solid English fare, that had sprung up in the
great coffee days, when taverns were clubs, and had since subsisted on
the attachment of steady bachelor Templars there had been dismay, and
even sorrow, for a month. The most constant patron of the
establishment—an old gentleman who had dined there for seven-and-twenty
years, four days in the week, off dishes dedicated to the particular
days, and had grown grey with the landlady, the cook, and the
head-waiter—this old gentleman had abruptly withheld his presence.
Though his name, his residence, his occupation, were things only to be
speculated on at the Aurora, he was very well known there, and as men
are best to be known: that is to say, by their habits. Some affection
for him also was felt. The landlady looked on him as a part of the
house. The cook and the waiter were accustomed to receive acceptable
compliments from him monthly. His precise words, his regular ancient
jokes, his pint of Madeira and after-pint of Port, his antique bow to
the landlady, passing out and in, his method of spreading his
table-napkin on his lap and looking up at the ceiling ere he fell to,
and how he talked to himself during the repast, and indulged in short
chuckles, and the one look of perfect felicity that played over his
features when he had taken his first sip of Port—these were matters it
pained them at the Aurora to have to remember.

For three weeks the resolution not to regard him as of the past was
general. The Aurora was the old gentleman’s home. Men do not play
truant from home at sixty years of age. He must, therefore, be
seriously indisposed. The kind heart of the landlady fretted to think
he might have no soul to nurse and care for him; but she kept his
corner near the fire-place vacant, and took care that his pint of
Madeira was there. The belief was gaining ground that he had gone, and
that nothing but his ghost would ever sit there again. Still the
melancholy ceremony continued: for the landlady was not without a
secret hope, that in spite of his reserve and the mystery surrounding
him, he would have sent her a last word. The cook and head-waiter,
interrogated as to their dealings with the old gentleman, testified
solemnly to the fact of their having performed their duty by him. They
would not go against their interests so much as to forget one of his
ways, they said—taking oath, as it were, by their lower nature, in
order to be credited: an instinct men have of one another. The landlady
could not contradict them, for the old gentleman had made no complaint;
but then she called to memory that fifteen years back, in such and such
a year, Wednesday’s dish had been, by shameful oversight, furnished him
for Tuesday’s, and he had eaten it quietly, but refused his Port; which
pathetic event had caused alarm and inquiry, when the error was
discovered, and apologized for, the old gentleman merely saying, “Don’t
let it happen again.” Next day he drank his Port, as usual, and the
wheels of the Aurora went smoothly. The landlady was thus justified in
averring that something had been done by somebody, albeit unable to
point to anything specific. Women, who are almost as deeply bound to
habit as old gentlemen, possess more of its spiritual element, and are
warned by dreams, omens, creepings of the flesh, unwonted chills,
suicide of china, and other shadowing signs, when a break is to be
anticipated, or, has occurred. The landlady of the Aurora tavern was
visited by none of these, and with that beautiful trust which habit
gives, and which boastful love or vainer earthly qualities would fail
in effecting, she ordered that the pint of Madeira should stand from
six o’clock in the evening till seven—a small monument of confidence in
him who was at one instant the “poor old dear”; at another, the
“naughty old gad-about”; further, the “faithless old-good-for-nothing”;
and again, the “blessed pet” of the landlady’s parlour, alternately and
indiscriminately apostrophized by herself, her sister, and daughter.

On the last day of the month a step was heard coming up the long alley
which led from the riotous scrambling street to the plentiful cheerful
heart of the Aurora. The landlady knew the step. She checked the
natural flutterings of her ribbons, toned down the strong simper that
was on her lips, rose, pushed aside her daughter, and, as the step
approached, curtsied composedly. Old Habit lifted his hat, and passed.
With the same touching confidence in the Aurora that the Aurora had in
him, he went straight to his corner, expressed no surprise at his
welcome by the Madeira, and thereby apparently indicated that his
appearance should enjoy a similar immunity.

As of old, he called “Jonathan!” and was not to be disturbed till he
did so. Seeing that Jonathan smirked and twiddled his napkin, the old
gentleman added, “Thursday!”

But Jonathan, a man, had not his mistress’s keen intuition of the
deportment necessitated by the case, or was incapable of putting the
screw upon weak excited nature, for he continued to smirk, and was
remarking how glad he was, he was sure, and something he had dared to
think and almost to fear, when the old gentleman called to him, as if
he were at the other end of the room, “Will you order Thursday, or not,
sir?” Whereat Jonathan flew, and two or three cosy diners glanced up
from their plates, or the paper, smiled, and pursued their capital
occupation.

“Glad to see me!” the old gentleman muttered, querulously. “Of course,
glad to see a customer! Why do you tell me that? Talk! tattle! might as
well have a woman to wait—just!”

He wiped his forehead largely with his handkerchief; as one whom
Calamity hunted a little too hard in summer weather.

“No tumbling-room for the wine, too!”

That was his next grievance. He changed the pint of Madeira from his
left side to his right, and went under his handkerchief again,
feverishly. The world was severe with this old gentleman.

“Ah! clock wrong now!”

He leaned back like a man who can no longer carry his burdens,
informing Jonathan, on his coming up to place the roll of bread and
firm butter, that he was forty seconds too fast, as if it were a
capital offence, and he deserved to step into Eternity for outstripping
Time.

“But, I daresay, you don’t understand the importance of a minute,” said
the old gentleman, bitterly. “Not you, or any of you. Better if we had
run a little ahead of your minute, perhaps—and the rest of you! Do you
think you can cancel the mischief that’s done in the world in that
minute, sir, by hurrying ahead like that? Tell me!”

Rather at a loss, Jonathan scanned the clock seriously, and observed
that it was not quite a minute too fast.

The old gentleman pulled out his watch. He grunted that a lying clock
was hateful to him; subsequently sinking into contemplation of his
thumbs,—a sign known to Jonathan as indicative of the old gentleman’s
system having resolved, in spite of external outrages, to be fortified
with calm to meet the repast.

It is not fair to go behind an eccentric; but the fact was, this old
gentleman was slightly ashamed of his month’s vagrancy and cruel
conduct, and cloaked his behaviour toward the Aurora, in all the
charges he could muster against it. He was very human, albeit an odd
form of the race.

Happily for his digestion of Thursday, the cook, warned by Jonathan,
kept the old gentleman’s time, not the Aurora’s: and the dinner was
correct; the dinner was eaten in peace; he began to address his plate
vigorously, poured out his Madeira, and chuckled, as the familiar ideas
engendered by good wine were revived in him. Jonathan reported at the
bar that the old gentleman was all right again.

One would like here to pause, while our worthy ancient feeds, and
indulge in a short essay on Habit, to show what a sacred and admirable
thing it is that makes flimsy Time substantial, and consolidates his
triple life. It is proof that we have come to the end of dreams and
Time’s delusions, and are determined to sit down at Life’s feast and
carve for ourselves. Its day is the child of yesterday, and has a claim
on to-morrow. Whereas those who have no such plan of existence and sum
of their wisdom to show, the winds blow them as they list. Consider,
then, mercifully the wrath of him on whom carelessness or forgetfulness
has brought a snap in the links of Habit. You incline to scorn him
because, his slippers misplaced, or asparagus not on his table the
first day of a particular Spring month, he gazes blankly and sighs as
one who saw the End. To you it may appear small. You call to him to be
a man. He is: but he is also an immortal, and his confidence in
unceasing orderly progression is rudely dashed.

But the old gentleman has finished his dinner and his Madeira, and
says: “Now, Jonathan, ‘thock’ the Port!”—his joke when matters have
gone well: meant to express the sound of the uncorking, probably. The
habit of making good jokes is rare, as you know: old gentlemen have not
yet attained to it: nevertheless Jonathan enjoys this one, which has
seen a generation in and out, for he knows its purport to be, “My heart
is open.”

And now is a great time with this old gentleman. He sips, and in his
eyes the world grows rosy, and he exchanges mute or monosyllable
salutes here and there. His habit is to avoid converse; but he will let
a light remark season meditation.

He says to Jonathan: “The bill for the month.”

“Yes, sir,” Jonathan replies. “Would you not prefer, sir, to have the
items added on to the month ensuing?”

“I asked you for the bill of the month,” said the old gentleman, with
an irritated voice and a twinkle in his eye.

Jonathan bowed; but his aspect betrayed perplexity, and that perplexity
was soon shared by the landlady for Jonathan said, he was convinced the
old gentleman intended to pay for sixteen days, and the landlady could
not bring her hand to charge him for more than two. Here was the
dilemma foreseen by the old gentleman, and it added vastly to the
flavour of the Port.

Pleasantly tickled, he sat gazing at his glass, and let the minutes
fly. He knew the part he would act in his little farce. If charged for
the whole month, he would peruse the bill deliberately, and perhaps cry
out “Hulloa?” and then snap at Jonathan for the interposition of a
remark. But if charged for two days, he would wish to be told whether
they were demented, those people outside, and scornfully return the
bill to Jonathan.

A slap on the shoulder, and a voice: “Found you at last, Tom!”
violently shattered the excellent plot, and made the old gentleman
start. He beheld Mr. Andrew Cogglesby.

“Drinking Port, Tom?” said Mr. Andrew. “I’ll join you”: and he sat down
opposite to him, rubbing his hands and pushing back his hair.

Jonathan entering briskly with the bill, fell back a step, in alarm.
The old gentleman, whose inviolacy was thus rudely assailed, sat
staring at the intruder, his mouth compressed, and three fingers round
his glass, which it was doubtful whether he was not going to hurl at
him.

“Waiter!” Mr. Andrew carelessly hailed, “a pint of this Port, if you
please.”

Jonathan sought the countenance of the old gentleman.

“Do you hear, sir?” cried the latter, turning his wrath on him.
“Another pint!” He added: “Take back the bill”; and away went Jonathan
to relate fresh marvels to his mistress.

Mr. Andrew then addressed the old gentleman in the most audacious
manner.

“Astonished to see me here, Tom? Dare say you are. I knew you came
somewhere in this neighbourhood, and, as I wanted to speak to you very
particularly, and you wouldn’t be visible till Monday, why, I spied
into two or three places, and here I am.”

You might see they were brothers. They had the same bushy eyebrows, the
same healthy colour in their cheeks, the same thick shoulders, and
brisk way of speaking, and clear, sharp, though kindly, eyes; only Tom
was cast in larger proportions than Andrew, and had gotten the grey
furniture of Time for his natural wear. Perhaps, too, a cross in early
life had a little twisted him, and set his mouth in a rueful bunch, out
of which occasionally came biting things. Mr. Andrew carried his head
up, and eyed every man living with the benevolence of a patriarch,
dashed with the impudence of a London sparrow. Tom had a nagging air,
and a trifle of acridity on his broad features. Still, any one at a
glance could have sworn they were brothers, and Jonathan unhesitatingly
proclaimed it at the Aurora bar.

Mr. Andrew’s hands were working together, and at them, and at his face,
the old gentleman continued to look with a firmly interrogating air.

“Want to know what brings me, Tom? I’ll tell you presently. Hot,—isn’t
it?”

“What the deuce are you taking exercise for?” the old gentleman burst
out, and having unlocked his mouth, he began to puff and alter his
posture.

“There you are, thawed in a minute!” said Mr. Andrew. “What’s an
eccentric? a child grown grey. It isn’t mine; I read it somewhere. Ah,
here’s the Port! good, I’ll warrant.”

Jonathan deferentially uncorked, excessive composure on his visage. He
arranged the table-cloth to a nicety, fixed the bottle with exactness,
and was only sent scudding by the old gentleman’s muttering of:
“Eavesdropping pie!” followed by a short, “Go!” and even then he must
delay to sweep off a particular crumb.

“Good it is!” said Mr. Andrew, rolling the flavour on his lips, as he
put down his glass. “I follow you in Port, Tom. Elder brother!”

The old gentleman also drank, and was mollified enough to reply:
“Shan’t follow you in Parliament.”

“Haven’t forgiven that yet, Tom?”

“No great harm done when you’re silent.”

“Capital Port!” said Mr. Andrew, replenishing the glasses. “I ought to
have inquired where they kept the best Port. I might have known you’d
stick by it. By the way, talking of Parliament, there’s talk of a new
election for Fallowfield. You have a vote there. Will you give it to
Jocelyn? There’s talk of his standing.

“If he’ll wear petticoats, I’ll give him my vote.”

“There you go, Tom!”

“I hate masquerades. You’re penny trumpets of the women. That tattle
comes from the bed-curtains. When a petticoat steps forward I give it
my vote, or else I button it up in my pocket.”

This was probably one of the longest speeches he had ever delivered at
the Aurora. There was extra Port in it. Jonathan, who from his place of
observation noted the length of time it occupied, though he was unable
to gather the context, glanced at Mr. Andrew with a sly satisfaction.
Mr. Andrew, laughing, signalled for another pint.

“So you’ve come here for my vote, have you?” said Mr. Tom.

“Why, no; not exactly that,” Mr. Andrew answered, blinking and passing
it by.

Jonathan brought the fresh pint, and Tom filled for himself, drank, and
said emphatically, and with a confounding voice:

“Your women have been setting you on me, sir!”

Andrew protested that he was entirely mistaken.

“You’re the puppet of your women!”

“Well, Tom, not in this instance. Here’s to the bachelors, and brother
Tom at their head!”

It seemed to be Andrew’s object to help his companion to carry a
certain quantity of Port, as if he knew a virtue it had to subdue him,
and to have fixed on a particular measure that he should hold before he
addressed him specially. Arrived at this, he said:

“Look here, Tom. I know your ways. I shouldn’t have bothered you here;
I never have before; but we couldn’t very well talk it over in business
hours; and besides you’re never at the Brewery till Monday, and the
matter’s rather urgent.”

“Why don’t you speak like that in Parliament?” the old man interposed.

“Because Parliament isn’t my brother,” replied Mr. Andrew. “You know,
Tom, you never quite took to my wife’s family.”

“I’m not a match for fine ladies, Nan.”

“Well, Harriet would have taken to you, Tom, and will now, if you’ll
let her. Of course, it’s a pity if she’s ashamed of—hem! You found it
out about the Lymport people, Tom, and, you’ve kept the secret and
respected her feelings, and I thank you for it. Women are odd in those
things, you know. She mustn’t imagine I’ve heard a whisper. I believe
it would kill her.”

The old gentleman shook silently.

“Do you want me to travel over the kingdom, hawking her for the
daughter of a marquis?”

“Now, don’t joke, Tom. I’m serious. Are you not a Radical at heart? Why
do you make such a set against the poor women? What do we spring from?”

“I take off my hat, Nan, when I see a cobbler’s stall.”

“And I, Tom, don’t care a rush who knows it. Homo—something; but we
never had much schooling. We’ve thriven, and should help those we can.
We’ve got on in the world...”

“Wife come back from Lymport?” sneered Tom.

Andrew hurriedly, and with some confusion, explained that she had not
been able to go, on account of the child.

“Account of the child!” his brother repeated, working his chin
contemptuously. “Sisters gone?”

“They’re stopping with us,” said Andrew, reddening.

“So the tailor was left to the kites and the crows. Ah! hum!” and Tom
chuckled.

“You’re angry with me, Tom, for coming here,” said Andrew. “I see what
it is. Thought how it would be! You’re offended, old Tom.”

“Come where you like,” returned Tom, “the place is open. It’s a fool
that hopes for peace anywhere. They sent a woman here to wait on me,
this day month.”

“That’s a shame!” said Mr. Andrew, propitiatingly. “Well, never mind,
Tom: the women are sometimes in the way.—Evan went down to bury his
father. He’s there now. You wouldn’t see him when he was at the
Brewery, Tom. He’s—upon my honour! he’s a good young fellow.”

“A fine young gentleman, I’ve no doubt, Nan.”

“A really good lad, Tom. No nonsense. I’ve come here to speak to you
about him.”

Mr. Andrew drew a letter from his pocket, pursuing: “Just throw aside
your prejudices, and read this. It’s a letter I had from him this
morning. But first I must tell you how the case stands.”

“Know more than you can tell me, Nan,” said Tom, turning over the
flavour of a gulp of his wine.

“Well, then, just let me repeat it. He has been capitally educated; he
has always been used to good society: well, we mustn’t sneer at it:
good society’s better than bad, you’ll allow. He has refined tastes:
well, you wouldn’t like to live among crossing-sweepers, Tom. He’s
clever and accomplished, can speak and write in three languages: I wish
I had his abilities. He has good manners: well, Tom, you know you like
them as well as anybody. And now—but read for yourself.”

“Yah!” went old Tom. “The women have been playing the fool with him
since he was a baby. I read his rigmarole? No.”

Mr. Andrew shrugged his shoulders, and opened the letter, saying:
“Well, listen”; and then he coughed, and rapidly skimmed the
introductory part. “Excuses himself for addressing me formally—poor
boy! Circumstances have altered his position towards the world: found
his father’s affairs in a bad state: only chance of paying off father’s
debts to undertake management of business, and bind himself to so much
a year. But there, Tom, if you won’t read it, you miss the poor young
fellow’s character. He says that he has forgotten his station: fancied
he was superior to trade, but hates debt; and will not allow anybody to
throw dirt at his father’s name, while he can work to clear it; and
will sacrifice his pride. Come, Tom, that’s manly, isn’t it? I call it
touching, poor lad!”

Manly it may have been, but the touching part of it was a feature
missed in Mr. Andrew’s hands. At any rate, it did not appear favourably
to impress Tom, whose chin had gathered its ominous puckers, as he
inquired:

“What’s the trade? he don’t say.”

Andrew added, with a wave of the hand: “Out of a sort of feeling for
his sisters—I like him for it. Now what I want to ask you, Tom, is,
whether we can’t assist him in some way! Why couldn’t we take him into
our office, and fix him there, eh? If he works well—we’re both getting
old, and my brats are chicks—we might, by-and-by, give him a share.”

“Make a brewer of him? Ha! there’d be another mighty sacrifice for his
pride!”

“Come, come, Tom,” said Andrew, “he’s my wife’s brother, and I’m yours;
and—there, you know what women are. They like to preserve appearances:
we ought to consider them.”

“Preserve appearances!” echoed Tom: “ha! who’ll do that for them better
than a tailor?”

Andrew was an impatient little man, fitter for a kind action than to
plead a cause. Jeering jarred on him; and from the moment his brother
began it, he was of small service to Evan. He flung back against the
partition of the compound, rattling it to the disturbance of many a
quiet digestion.

“Tom,” he cried, “I believe you’re a screw!”

“Never said I wasn’t,” rejoined Tom, as he finished his glass. “I’m a
bachelor, and a person—you’re married, and an object. I won’t have the
tailor’s family at my coat-tails.”

Do you mean to say, Tom, you don’t like the young fellow? The Countess
says he’s half engaged to an heiress; and he has a chance of
appointments—of course, nothing may come of them. But do you mean to
say, you don’t like him for what he has done?”

Tom made his jaw disagreeably prominent. “’Fraid I’m guilty of that
crime.”

“And you that swear at people pretending to be above their station!”
exclaimed Andrew. “I shall get in a passion. I can’t stand this. Here,
waiter! what have I to pay?”

“Go,” cried the time-honoured guest of the Aurora to Jonathan
advancing.

Andrew pressed the very roots of his hair back from his red forehead,
and sat upright and resolute, glancing at Tom. And now ensued a curious
scene of family blood. For no sooner did elderly Tom observe this
bantam-like demeanour of his brother, than he ruffled his feathers
likewise, and looked down on him, agitating his wig over a prodigious
frown. Whereof came the following sharp colloquy; Andrew beginning:

“I’ll pay off the debts out of my own pocket.”

“You can make a greater fool of yourself, then?”

“He shan’t be a tailor!”

“He shan’t be a brewer!”

“I say he shall live like a gentleman!”

“I say he shall squat like a Turk!”

Bang went Andrew’s hand on the table: “I’ve pledged my word, mind!”

Tom made a counter demonstration: “And I’ll have my way!”

“Hang it! I can be as eccentric as you,” said Andrew.

“And I as much a donkey as you, if I try hard,” said Tom.

Something of the cobbler’s stall followed this; till waxing furious,
Tom sung out to Jonathan, hovering around them in watchful timidity,
“More Port!” and the words immediately fell oily on the wrath of the
brothers; both commenced wiping their heads with their handkerchiefs
the faces of both emerged and met, with a half-laugh: and, severally
determined to keep to what they had spoken, there was a tacit accord
between them to drop the subject.

Like sunshine after smart rain, the Port shone on these brothers. Like
a voice from the pastures after the bellowing of the thunder, Andrew’s
voice asked: “Got rid of that twinge of the gout, Tom? Did you rub in
that ointment?” while Tom replied: “Ay. How about that rheumatism of
yours? Have you tried that Indy oil?” receiving a like assurance.

The remainder of the Port ebbed in meditation and chance remarks. The
bit of storm had done them both good; and Tom especially—the cynical,
carping, grim old gentleman—was much improved by the nearer resemblance
of his manner to Andrew’s.

Behind this unaffected fraternal concord, however, the fact that they
were pledged to a race in eccentricity, was present. They had been
rivals before; and anterior to the date of his marriage, Andrew had
done odd eclipsing things. But Andrew required prompting to it; he
required to be put upon his mettle. Whereas, it was more nature with
Tom: nature and the absence of a wife, gave him advantages over Andrew.
Besides, he had his character to maintain. He had said the word: and
the first vanity of your born eccentric is, that he shall be taken for
infallible.

Presently Andrew ducked his head to mark the evening clouds flushing
over the court-yard of the Aurora.

“Time to be off, Tom,” he said: “wife at home.”

“Ah!” Tom answered. “Well, I haven’t got to go to bed so early.”

“What an old rogue you are, Tom!” Andrew pushed his elbows forward on
the table amiably. “’Gad, we haven’t drunk wine together since—by
George! we’ll have another pint.”

“Many as you like,” said Tom.

Over the succeeding pint, Andrew, in whose veins the Port was merry,
favoured his brother with an imitation of Major Strike, and indicated
his dislike to that officer. Tom informed him that Major Strike was
speculating.

“The ass eats at my table, and treats me with contempt.”

“Just tell him that you’re putting by the bones for him. He’ll want
’em.”

Then Andrew with another glance at the clouds, now violet on a grey
sky, said he must really be off. Upon which Tom observed: “Don’t come
here again.”

“You old rascal, Tom!” cried Andrew, swinging over the table: “it’s
quite jolly for us to be hob-a-nobbing together once more. ’Gad!—no, we
won’t though! I promised—Harriet. Eh? What say, Tom?”

“Nother pint, Nan?”

Tom shook his head in a roguishly-cosy, irresistible way. Andrew, from
a shake of denial and resolve, fell into the same; and there sat the
two brothers—a jolly picture.

The hour was ten, when Andrew Cogglesby, comforted by Tom’s remark,
that he, Tom, had a wig, and that he, Andrew, would have a wigging,
left the Aurora; and he left it singing a song. Tom Cogglesby still sat
at his table, holding before him Evan’s letter, of which he had got
possession; and knocking it round and round with a stroke of the
forefinger, to the tune of, “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
’pothecary, ploughboy, thief”; each profession being sounded as a
corner presented itself to the point of his nail. After indulging in
this species of incantation for some length of time, Tom Cogglesby read
the letter from beginning to end, and called peremptorily for pen, ink,
and paper.




CHAPTER IX.
THE COUNTESS IN LOW SOCIETY


By dint of stratagems worthy of a Court intrigue, the Countess de
Saldar contrived to traverse the streets of Lymport, and enter the
house where she was born, unsuspected and unseen, under cover of a
profusion of lace and veil and mantilla, which only her heroic resolve
to keep her beauties hidden from the profane townspeople could have
rendered endurable beneath the fervid summer sun. Dress in a foreign
style she must, as without it she lost that sense of superiority, which
was the only comfort to her in her tribulations. The period of her
arrival was ten days subsequent to the burial of her father. She had
come in the coach, like any common mortal, and the coachman, upon her
request, had put her down at the Governor’s house, and the guard had
knocked at the door, and the servant had informed her that General
Hucklebridge was not the governor of Lymport, nor did Admiral Combleman
then reside in the town; which tidings, the coach then being out of
sight, it did not disconcert the Countess to hear; and she reached her
mother, having, at least, cut off communication with the object of
conveyance.

The Countess kissed her mother, kissed Mrs. Fiske, and asked sharply
for Evan. Mrs. Fiske let her know that Evan was in the house.

“Where?” inquired the Countess. “I have news of the utmost importance
for him. I must see him.”

“Where is he, aunt?” said Mrs. Fiske. “In the shop, I think; I wonder
he did not see you passing, Louisa.”

The Countess went bolt down into a chair.

“Go to him, Jane,” said Mrs. Mel. “Tell him Louisa is here, and don’t
return.”

Mrs. Fiske departed, and the Countess smiled.

“Thank you, Mama! you know I never could bear that odious, vulgar
little woman. Oh, the heat! You talk of Portugal! And, oh! poor dear
Papa! what I have suffered!”

Flapping her laces for air, and wiping her eyes for sorrow, the
Countess poured a flood of sympathy into her mother’s ears and then
said:

“But you have made a great mistake, Mama, in allowing Evan to put his
foot into that place. He—beloved of an heiress! Why, if an enemy should
hear of it, it would ruin him—positively blast him—for ever. And that
she loves him I have proof positive. Yes; with all her frankness, the
little thing cannot conceal that from me now. She loves him! And I
desire you to guess, Mama, whether rivals will not abound? And what
enemy so much to be dreaded as a rival? And what revelation so awful as
that he has stood in a—in a—boutique?”

Mrs. Mel maintained her usual attitude for listening. It had occurred
to her that it might do no good to tell the grand lady, her daughter,
of Evan’s resolution, so she simply said, “It is discipline for him,”
and left her to speak a private word with the youth.

Timidly the Countess inspected the furniture of the apartment, taking
chills at the dingy articles she saw, in the midst of her heat. That
she should have sprung from this! The thought was painful; still she
could forgive Providence so much. But should it ever be known she had
sprung from this! Alas! she felt she never could pardon such a dire
betrayal. She had come in good spirits, but the mention of Evan’s
backsliding had troubled her extremely, and though she did not say to
herself, What was the benefit resulting from her father’s dying, if
Evan would be so base-minded? she thought the thing indefinitely, and
was forming the words on her mouth, One Harrington in a shop is equal
to all! when Evan appeared alone.

“Why, goodness gracious! where’s your moustache?” cried the Countess.

“Gone the way of hair!” said Evan, coldly stooping to her forehead.

“Such a distinction!” the Countess continued, reproachfully. “Why, mon
Dieu! one could hardly tell you; as you look now, from the very
commonest tradesman—if you were not rather handsome and something of a
figure. It’s a disguise, Evan—do you know that?”

“And I’ve parted with it—that’s all,” said Evan. “No more disguises for
me!”

The Countess immediately took his arm, and walked with him to a window.
His face was certainly changed. Murmuring that the air of Lymport was
bad for him, and that he must leave it instantly, she bade him sit and
attend to what she was about to say.

“While you have been here, degenerating, Evan, day by day—as you always
do out of my sight—degenerating! no less a word!—I have been slaving in
your interests. Yes; I have forced the Jocelyns socially to acknowledge
us. I have not slept; I have eaten bare morsels. Do abstinence and
vigils clear the wits? I know not! but indeed they have enabled me to
do more in a week than would suffice for a lifetime. Hark to me. I have
discovered Rose’s secret. Si! It is so! Rose loves you. You blush; you
blush like a girl. She loves you, and you have let yourself be seen in
a shop! Contrast me the two things. Oh! in verity, dreadful as it is,
one could almost laugh. But the moment I lose sight of you, my
instructions vanish as quickly as that hair on your superior lip, which
took such time to perfect. Alas! you must grow it again immediately.
Use any perfumer’s contrivance. Rowland! I have great faith in Rowland.
Without him, I believe, there would have been many bald women
committing suicide! You remember the bottle I gave to the Count de
Villa Flor? ‘Countess,’ he said to me, ‘you have saved this egg-shell
from a crack by helping to cover it’—for so he called his head—the top,
you know, was beginning to shine like an egg. And I do fear me he would
have done it. Ah! you do not conceive what the dread of baldness is! To
a woman death—death is preferable to baldness! Baldness is death! And a
wig—a wig! Oh, horror! total extinction is better than to rise again in
a wig! But you are young, and play with hair. But I was saying, I went
to see the Jocelyns. I was introduced to Sir Franks and his lady and
the wealthy grandmother. And I have an invitation for you, Evan—you
unmannered boy, that you do not bow! A gentle incline forward of the
shoulders, and the eyes fixed softly, your upper lids drooping
triflingly, as if you thanked with gentle sincerity, but were
indifferent. Well, well, if you will not! An invitation for you to
spend part of the autumn at Beckley Court, the ancestral domain, where
there will be company the nobles of the land! Consider that. You say it
was bold in me to face them after that horrible man committed us on
board the vessel? A Harrington is anything but a coward. I did go and
because I am devoted to your interests. That very morning, I saw
announced in the paper, just beneath poor Andrew’s hand, as he held it
up at the breakfast-table, reading it, I saw among the deaths, Sir
Abraham Harrington, of Torquay, Baronet, of quinsy! Twice that good man
has come to my rescue! Oh! I welcomed him as a piece of Providence! I
turned and said to Harriet, ‘I see they have put poor Papa in the
paper.’ Harriet was staggered. I took the paper from Andrew, and
pointed it to her. She has no readiness. She has had no foreign
training. She could not comprehend, and Andrew stood on tiptoe, and
peeped. He has a bad cough, and coughed himself black in the face. I
attribute it to excessive bad manners and his cold feelings. He left
the room. I reproached Harriet. But, oh! the singularity of the
excellent fortune of such an event at such a time! It showed that our
Harrington-luck had not forsaken us. I hurried to the Jocelyns
instantly. Of course, it cleared away any suspicions aroused in them by
that horrible man on board the vessel. And the tears I wept for Sir
Abraham, Evan, in verity they were tears of deep and sincere gratitude!
What is your mouth knitting the corners at? Are you laughing?”

Evan hastily composed his visage to the melancholy that was no
counterfeit in him just then.

“Yes,” continued the Countess, easily reassured, “I shall ever feel a
debt to Sir Abraham Harrington, of Torquay. I dare say we are related
to him. At least he has done us more service than many a rich and
titled relative. No one supposes he would acknowledge poor Papa. I can
forgive him that, Evan!” The Countess pointed out her finger with
mournful and impressive majesty, “As we look down on that monkey,
people of rank and consideration in society look on what poor dear Papa
was.”

This was partly true, for Jacko sat on a chair, in his favourite
attitude, copied accurately from the workmen of the establishment at
their labour with needle and thread. Growing cognizant of the infamy of
his posture, the Countess begged Evan to drive him out of her sight,
and took a sniff at her smelling-bottle.

She went on: “Now, dear Van, you would hear of your sweet Rose?”

“Not a word!” Evan hastily answered.

“Why, what does this indicate? Whims! Then you do love?”

“I tell you, Louisa, I don’t want to hear a word of any of them,” said
Evan, with an angry gleam in his eyes. “They are nothing to me, nor I
to them. I—my walk in life is not theirs.”

“Faint heart! faint heart!” the Countess lifted a proverbial
forefinger.

“Thank heaven, I shall have the consolation of not going about, and
bowing and smirking like an impostor!” Evan exclaimed.

There was a wider intelligence in the Countess’s arrested gaze than she
chose to fashion into speech.

“I knew,” she said, “I knew how the air of this horrible Lymport would
act on you. But while I live, Evan, you shall not sink in the sludge.
You, with all the pains I have lavished on you! and with your
presence!—for you have a presence, so rare among young men in this
England! You, who have been to a Court, and interchanged bows with
duchesses, and I know not what besides—nay, I do not accuse you; but if
you had not been a mere boy, and an English boy—poor Eugenia herself
confessed to me that you had a look—a tender cleaving of the
underlids—that made her catch her hand to her heart sometimes: it
reminded her so acutely of false Belmaraña. Could you have had a
greater compliment than that? You shall not stop here another day!”

“True,” said Evan, “for I’m going to London to-night.”

“Not to London,” the Countess returned, with a conquering glance, “but
to Beckley Court—and with me.”

“To London, Louisa, with Mr. Goren.”

Again the Countess eyed him largely; but took, as it were, a side-path
from her broad thought, saying: “Yes, fortunes are made in London, if
you would they should be rapid.”

She meditated. At that moment Dandy knocked at the door, and called
outside: “Please, master, Mr. Goren says there’s a gentleman in the
shop—wants to see you.”

“Very well,” replied Evan, moving. He was swung violently round.

The Countess had clutched him by the arm. A fearful expression was on
her face.

“Whither do you go?” she said.

“To the shop, Louisa.”

Too late to arrest the villanous word, she pulled at him. “Are you
quite insane? Consent to be seen by a gentleman there? What has come to
you? You must be lunatic! Are we all to be utterly ruined—disgraced?”

“Is my mother to starve?” said Evan.

“Absurd rejoinder! No! You should have sold everything here before
this. She can live with Harriet—she—once out of this horrible
element—she would not show it. But, Evan, you are getting away from me:
you are not going?—speak!”

“I am going,” said Evan.

The Countess clung to him, exclaiming: “Never, while I have the power
to detain you!” but as he was firm and strong, she had recourse to her
woman’s aids, and burst into a storm of sobs on his shoulder—a scene of
which Mrs. Mel was, for some seconds, a composed spectator.

“What’s the matter now?” said Mrs. Mel.

Evan impatiently explained the case. Mrs. Mel desired her daughter to
avoid being ridiculous, and making two fools in her family; and at the
same time that she told Evan there was no occasion for him to go,
contrived, with a look, to make the advice a command. He, in that state
of mind when one takes bitter delight in doing an abhorred duty, was
hardly willing to be submissive; but the despair of the Countess
reduced him, and for her sake he consented to forego the sacrifice of
his pride which was now his sad, sole pleasure. Feeling him linger, the
Countess relaxed her grasp. Hers were tears that dried as soon as they
had served their end; and, to give him the full benefit of his conduct,
she said: “I knew Evan would be persuaded by me.”

Evan pitifully pressed her hand, and sighed.

“Tea is on the table down-stairs,” said Mrs. Mel. “I have cooked
something for you, Louisa. Do you sleep here to-night?”

“Can I tell you, Mama?” murmured the Countess. “I am dependent on our
Evan.”

“Oh! well, we will eat first,” said Mrs. Mel, and they went to the
table below, the Countess begging her mother to drop titles in
designating her to the servants, which caused Mrs. Mel to say:

“There is but one. I do the cooking”; and the Countess, ever disposed
to flatter and be suave, even when stung by a fact or a phrase, added:

“And a beautiful cook you used to be, dear Mama!”

At the table, awaiting them, sat Mrs. Wishaw, Mrs. Fiske, and Mr.
Goren, who soon found themselves enveloped in the Countess’s
graciousness. Mr. Goren would talk of trade, and compare Lymport
business with London, and the Countess, loftily interested in his
remarks, drew him out to disgust her brother. Mrs. Wishaw, in whom the
Countess at once discovered a frivolous pretentious woman of the
moneyed trading class, she treated as one who was alive to society, and
surveyed matters from a station in the world, leading her to think that
she tolerated Mr. Goren, as a lady-Christian of the highest rank should
tolerate the insects that toil for us. Mrs. Fiske was not so tractable,
for Mrs. Fiske was hostile and armed. Mrs. Fiske adored the great Mel,
and she had never loved Louisa. Hence, she scorned Louisa on account of
her late behaviour toward her dead parent. The Countess saw through
her, and laboured to be friendly with her, while she rendered her
disagreeable in the eyes of Mrs. Wishaw, and let Mrs. Wishaw perceive
that sympathy was possible between them; manoeuvring a trifle too
delicate, perhaps, for the people present, but sufficient to blind its
keen-witted author to the something that was being concealed from
herself, of which something, nevertheless, her senses apprehensively
warned her: and they might have spoken to her wits, but that mortals
cannot, unaided, guess, or will not, unless struck in the face by the
fact, credit, what is to their minds the last horror.

“I came down in the coach, quite accidental, with this gentleman,” said
Mrs. Wishaw, fanning a cheek and nodding at Mr. Goren. “I’m an old
flame of dear Mel’s. I knew him when he was an apprentice in London.
Now, wasn’t it odd? Your mother—I suppose I must call you ‘my lady’?”

The Countess breathed a tender “Spare me,” with a smile that added,
“among friends!”

Mrs. Wishaw resumed: “Your mother was an old flame of this gentleman’s,
I found out. So there were two old flames, and I couldn’t help
thinking! But I was so glad to have seen dear Mel once more.”

“Ah!” sighed the Countess.

“He was always a martial-looking man, and laid out, he was quite
imposing. I declare, I cried so, as it reminded me of when I couldn’t
have him, for he had nothing but his legs and arms—and I married
Wishaw. But it’s a comfort to think I have been of some service to
dear, dear Mel! for Wishaw’s a man of accounts and payments; and I knew
Mel had cloth from him, and,” the lady suggested bills delayed, with
two or three nods, “you know! and I’ll do my best for his son.”

“You are kind,” said the Countess, smiling internally at the vulgar
creature’s misconception of Evan’s requirements.

“Did he ever talk much about Mary Fence?” asked Mrs. Wishaw. “‘Polly
Fence,’ he used to say, ‘sweet Polly Fence!’”

“Oh! I think so. Frequently,” observed the Countess.

Mrs. Fiske primmed her mouth. She had never heard the great Mel allude
to the name of Fence.

The Goren-croak was heard:

“Painters have painted out ‘Melchisedec’ this afternoon. Yes,—ah! In
and out—as the saying goes.”

Here was an opportunity to mortify the Countess.

Mrs. Fiske placidly remarked: “Have we the other put up in its stead?
It’s shorter.”

A twinge of weakness had made Evan request that the name of Evan
Harrington should not decorate the shopfront till he had turned his
back on it, for a time. Mrs. Mel crushed her venomous niece.

“What have you to do with such things? Shine in your own affairs first,
Ann, before you meddle with others.”

Relieved at hearing that “Melchisedec” was painted out, and
unsuspicious of the announcement that should replace it, the Countess
asked Mrs. Wishaw if she thought Evan like her dear Papa.

“So like,” returned the lady, “that I would not be alone with him yet,
for worlds. I should expect him to be making love to me: for, you know,
my dear—I must be familiar—Mel never could be alone with you, without!
It was his nature. I speak of him before marriage. But, if I can trust
myself with him, I shall take charge of Mr. Evan, and show him some
London society.”

“That is indeed kind,” said the Countess, glad of a thick veil for the
utterance of her contempt. “Evan, though—I fear—will be rather engaged.
His friends, the Jocelyns of Beckley Court, will—I fear—hardly dispense
with him and Lady Splenders—you know her? the Marchioness of Splenders?
No?—by repute, at least: a most beautiful and most fascinating woman;
report of him alone has induced her to say that Evan must and shall
form a part of her autumnal gathering at Splenders Castle. And how he
is to get out of it, I cannot tell. But I am sure his multitudinous
engagements will not prevent his paying due court to Mistress Wishaw.”

As the Countess intended, Mistress Wishaw’s vanity was reproved, and
her ambition excited: a pretty doublestroke, only possible to dexterous
players.

The lady rejoined that she hoped so, she was sure; and forthwith
(because she suddenly seemed to possess him more than his son),
launched upon Mel’s incomparable personal attractions. This caused the
Countess to enlarge upon Evan’s vast personal prospects. They talked
across each other a little, till the Countess remembered her breeding,
allowed Mrs. Wishaw to run to an end in hollow exclamations, and put a
finish to the undeclared controversy, by a traverse of speech, as if
she were taking up the most important subject of their late colloquy.
“But Evan is not in his own hands—he is in the hands of a lovely young
woman, I must tell you. He belongs to her, and not to us. You have
heard of Rose Jocelyn, the celebrated heiress?”

“Engaged?” Mrs. Wishaw whispered aloud.

The Countess, an adept in the lie implied—practised by her, that she
might not subject herself to future punishment (in which she was so
devout a believer, that she condemned whole hosts to it)—deeply smiled.

“Really!” said Mrs. Wishaw, and was about to inquire why Evan, with
these brilliant expectations, could think of trade and tailoring, when
the young man, whose forehead had been growing black, jumped up, and
quitted them; thus breaking the harmony of the table; and as the
Countess had said enough, she turned the conversation to the always
welcome theme of low society. She broached death and corpses; and
became extremely interesting, and very sympathetic: the only difference
between the ghostly anecdotes she related, and those of the other
ladies, being that her ghosts were all of them titled, and walked
mostly under the burden of a coronet. For instance, there was the
Portuguese Marquis de Col. He had married a Spanish wife, whose end was
mysterious. Undressing, on the night of the anniversary of her death,
and on the point of getting into bed, he beheld the dead woman lying on
her back before him. All night long he had to sleep with this freezing
phantom! Regularly, every fresh anniversary, he had to endure the same
penance, no matter where he might be, or in what strange bed. On one
occasion, when he took the live for the dead, a curious thing occurred,
which the Countess scrupled less to relate than would men to hint at.
Ghosts were the one childish enjoyment Mrs. Mel allowed herself, and
she listened to her daughter intently, ready to cap any narrative; but
Mrs. Fiske stopped the flood.

“You have improved on Peter Smithers, Louisa,” she said.

The Countess turned to her mildly.

“You are certainly thinking of Peter Smithers,” Mrs. Fiske continued,
bracing her shoulders. “Surely, you remember poor Peter, Louisa? An old
flame of your own! He was going to kill himself, but married a
Devonshire woman, and they had disagreeables, and SHE died, and he was
undressing, and saw her there in the bed, and wouldn’t get into it, and
had the mattress, and the curtains, and the counterpanes, and
everything burnt. He told us it himself. You must remember it, Louisa?”

The Countess remembered nothing of the sort. No doubt could exist of
its having been the Portuguese Marquis de Col, because he had confided
to her the whole affair, and indeed come to her, as his habit was, to
ask her what he could possibly do, under the circumstances. If Mrs.
Fiske’s friend, who married the Devonshire person, had seen the same
thing, the coincidence was yet more extraordinary than the case. Mrs.
Fiske said it assuredly was, and glanced at her aunt, who, as the
Countess now rose, declaring she must speak to Evan, chid Mrs. Fiske,
and wished her and Peter Smithers at the bottom of the sea.

“No, no, Mama,” said the Countess, laughing, “that would hardly be
proper,” and before Mrs. Fiske could reply, escaped to complain to Evan
of the vulgarity of those women.

She was not prepared for the burst of wrath with which Evan met her.
“Louisa,” said he, taking her wrist sternly, “you have done a thing I
can’t forgive. I find it hard to bear disgrace myself: I will not
consent to bring it upon others. Why did you dare to couple Miss
Jocelyn’s name with mine?”

The Countess gave him out her arm’s length. “Speak on, Van,” she said,
admiring him with a bright gaze.

“Answer me, Louisa; and don’t take me for a fool any more,” he pursued.
“You have coupled Miss Jocelyn’s name with mine, in company, and I
insist now upon your giving me your promise to abstain from doing it
anywhere, before anybody.”

“If she saw you at this instant, Van,” returned the incorrigible
Countess, “would she desire it, think you? Oh! I must make you angry
before her, I see that! You have your father’s frown. You surpass him,
for your delivery is more correct, and equally fluent. And if a woman
is momentarily melted by softness in a man, she is for ever subdued by
boldness and bravery of mien.”

Evan dropped her hand. “Miss Jocelyn has done me the honour to call me
her friend. That was in other days.” His lip quivered. “I shall not see
Miss Jocelyn again. Yes; I would lay down my life for her; but that’s
idle talk. No such chance will ever come to me. But I can save her from
being spoken of in alliance with me, and what I am, and I tell you,
Louisa, I will not have it.” Saying which, and while he looked harshly
at her, wounded pride bled through his eyes.

She was touched. “Sit down, dear; I must explain to you, and make you
happy against your will,” she said, in another voice, and an English
accent. “The mischief is done, Van. If you do not want Rose Jocelyn to
love you, you must undo it in your own way. I am not easily deceived.
On the morning I went to her house in town, she took me aside, and
spoke to me. Not a confession in words. The blood in her cheeks, when I
mentioned you, did that for her. Everything about you she must know—how
you bore your grief, and all. And not in her usual free manner, but
timidly, as if she feared a surprise, or feared to be wakened to the
secret in her bosom she half suspects—‘Tell him!’ she said, ‘I hope he
will not forget me.’”

The Countess was interrupted by a great sob; for the picture of frank
Rose Jocelyn changed, and soft, and, as it were, shadowed under a veil
of bashful regard for him, so filled the young man with sorrowful
tenderness, that he trembled, and was as a child.

Marking the impression she had produced on him, and having worn off
that which he had produced on her, the Countess resumed the art in her
style of speech, easier to her than nature.

“So the sweetest of Roses may be yours, dear Van; and you have her in a
gold setting, to wear on your heart. Are you not enviable? I will
not—no, I will not tell you sh

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