The Entire Short Works of George Meredith by George Meredith (page 5)

‘I will own that to be always having the fellow dogging us, with his dejected leer, is not agreeable. He watches us now, because my lips are close by your cheek. He should be absent; he is one too many. Speed him on his voyage with the souvenir he asks for.’

‘I keep it for a journey of my own, which I may have to take,’ said Chloe.

‘With me?’

‘You will follow; you cannot help following me, Caseldy.’

He speculated on her front. She was tenderly smiling. ‘You are happy, Chloe?’

‘I have never known such happiness,’ she said. The brilliancy of her eyes confirmed it.

He glanced over at Duchess Susan, who was like a sunflower in the sun. His glance lingered a moment. Her abundant and glowing young charms were the richest fascination an eye like his could dwell on. ‘That is right,’ said he. ‘We will be perfectly happy till the month ends. And after it? But get us rid of Monsieur le Jeune; toss him that trifle; I spare him that. ‘Twill be bliss to him, at the cost of a bit of silk thread to us. Besides, if we keep him to cure him of his passion here, might it not be –these boys veer suddenly, like the winds of Albion, from one fair object to t’ other–at the cost of the precious and simple lady you are guarding? I merely hint. These two affect one another, as though it could be. She speaks of him. It shall be as you please, but a trifle like that, my Chloe, to be rid of a green eye!’

‘You much wish him gone?’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘The fellow is in our way.’

‘You think him a little perilous for my innocent lady?’

‘Candidly, I do.’

She stretched the half-plaited silken rope in her two hands to try the strength of it, made a second knot, and consigned it to her pocket.

At once she wore her liveliest playfellow air, in which character no one was so enchanting as Chloe could be, for she became the comrade of men without forfeit of her station among sage sweet ladies, and was like a well-mannered sparkling boy, to whom his admiring seniors have given the lead in sallies, whims, and fights; but pleasanter than a boy, the soft hues of her sex toned her frolic spirit; she seemed her sex’s deputy, to tell the coarser where they could meet, as on a bridge above the torrent separating them, gaily for interchange of the best of either, unfired and untempted by fire, yet with all the elements which make fire burn to animate their hearts.

‘Lucky the man who wins for himself that life-long cordial!’ Mr. Beamish said to Duchess Susan.

She had small comprehension of metaphorical phrases, but she was quick at reading faces; and comparing the enthusiasm on the face of the beau with Caseldy’s look of troubled wonderment and regret, she pitied the lover conscious of not having the larger share of his mistress’s affections. When presently he looked at her, the tender-hearted woman could have cried for very compassion, so sensible did he show himself of Chloe’s preference of the other.

CHAPTER VI

That evening Duchess Susan played at the Pharaoh table and lost eight hundred pounds, through desperation at the loss of twenty. After encouraging her to proceed to this extremity, Caseldy checked her. He was conducting her out of the Play room when a couple of young squires of the Shepster order, and primed with wine, intercepted her to present their condolences, which they performed with exaggerated gestures, intended for broad mimicry of the courtliness imported from the Continent, and a very dulcet harping on the popular variations of her Christian name, not forgetting her singular title, ‘my lovely, lovely Dewlap!’

She was excited and stunned by her immediate experience in the transfer of money, and she said, ‘I ‘m sure I don’t know what you want.’

‘Yes!’ cried they, striking their bosoms as guitars, and attempting the posture of the thrummer on the instrument; ‘she knows. She does know. Handsome Susie knows what we want.’ And one ejaculated, mellifluously, ‘Oh!’ and the other ‘Ah!’ in flagrant derision of the foreign ways they produced in boorish burlesque–a self-consolatory and a common trick of the boor.

Caseldy was behind. He pushed forward and bowed to them. ‘Sirs, will you mention to me what you want?’

He said it with a look that meant steel. It cooled them sufficiently to let him place the duchess under the protectorship of Mr. Beamish, then entering from another room with Chloe; whereupon the pair of rustic bucks retired to reinvigorate their valiant blood.

Mr. Beamish had seen that there was cause for gratitude to Caseldy, to whom he said, ‘She has lost?’ and he seemed satisfied on hearing the amount of the loss, and commissioned Caseldy to escort the ladies to their lodgings at once, observing, ‘Adieu, Count!’

‘You will find my foreign title of use to you here, after a bout or two,’ was the reply.

‘No bouts, if possibly to be avoided; though I perceive how the flavour of your countship may spread a wholesome alarm among our rurals, who will readily have at you with fists, but relish not the tricky cold weapon.’

Mr. Beamish haughtily bowed the duchess away.

Caseldy seized the opportunity while handing her into her sedan to say, ‘We will try the fortune-teller for a lucky day to have our revenge.’

She answered: ‘Oh, don’t talk to me about playing again ever; I’m nigh on a clean pocket, and never knew such a sinful place as this. I feel I’ve tumbled into a ditch. And there’s Mr. Beamish, all top when he bows to me. You’re keeping Chloe waiting, sir.’

‘Where was she while we were at the table?’

‘Sure she was with Mr. Beamish.’

‘Ah!’ he groaned.

‘The poor soul is in despair over her losses to-night,’ he turned from the boxed-up duchess to remark to Chloe. ‘Give her a comfortable cry and a few moral maxims.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘You love me, Caseldy?’

‘Love you? I? Your own? What assurance would you have?’

‘None, dear friend.’

Here was a woman easily deceived.

In the hearts of certain men, owing to an intellectual contempt of easy dupes, compunction in deceiving is diminished by the lightness of their task; and that soft confidence which will often, if but passingly, bid betrayers reconsider the charms of the fair soul they are abandoning, commends these armoured knights to pursue with redoubled earnest the fruitful ways of treachery. Their feelings are warm for their prey, moreover; and choosing to judge their victim by the present warmth of their feelings, they can at will be hurt, even to being scandalized, by a coldness that does not waken one suspicion of them. Jealousy would have a chance of arresting, for it is not impossible to tease them back to avowed allegiance; but sheer indifference also has a stronger hold on them than a, dull, blind trustfulness. They hate the burden it imposes; the blind aspect is only touching enough to remind them of the burden, and they hate if for that, and for the enormous presumption of the belief that they are everlastingly bound to such an imbecile. She walks about with her eyes shut, expecting not to stumble, and when she does, am I to blame? The injured man asks it in the course of his reasoning.

He recurs to his victim’s merits, but only compassionately, and the compassion is chilled by the thought that she may in the end start across his path to thwart him. Thereat he is drawn to think of the prize she may rob him of; and when one woman is an obstacle, the other shines desirable as life beyond death; he must have her; he sees her in the hue of his desire for her, and the obstacle in that of his repulsion. Cruelty is no more than the man’s effort to win the wished object.

She should not leave it to his imagination to conceive that in the end the blind may awaken to thwart him. Better for her to cast him hence, or let him know that she will do battle to keep him. But the pride of a love that has hardened in the faithfulness of love cannot always be wise on trial.

Caseldy walked considerably in the rear of the couple of chairs. He saw on his way what was coming. His two young squires were posted at Duchess Susan’s door when she arrived, and he received a blow from one of them in clearing a way for her. She plucked at his hand. ‘Have they hurt you?’ she asked.

‘Think of me to-night thanking them and heaven for this, my darling,’ he replied, with a pressure that lit the flying moment to kindle the after hours.

Chloe had taken help of one of her bearers to jump out. She stretched a finger at the unruly intruders, crying sternly, ‘There is blood on you– come not nigh me!’ The loftiest harangue would not have been so cunning to touch their wits. They stared at one another in the clear moonlight. Which of them had blood on him? As they had not been for blood, but for rough fun, and something to boast of next day, they gesticulated according to the first instructions of the dancing master, by way of gallantry, and were out of Caseldy’s path when he placed himself at his liege lady’s service. ‘Take no notice of them, dear,’ she said.

‘No, no,’ said he; and ‘What is it?’ and his hoarse accent and shaking clasp of her arm sickened her to the sensation of approaching death.

Upstairs Duchess Susan made a show of embracing her. Both were trembling. The duchess ascribed her condition to those dreadful men. ‘What makes them be at me so?’ she said.

And Chloe said, ‘Because you are beautiful.’

‘Am I?’

‘You are.’

‘I am?’

‘Very beautiful; young and beautiful; beautiful in the bud. You will learn to excuse them, madam.’

‘But, Chloe–‘ The duchess shut her mouth. Out of a languid reverie, she sighed: ‘I suppose I must be! My duke–oh, don’t talk of him. Dear man! he’s in bed and fast asleep long before this. I wonder how he came to let me come here.

I did bother him, I know. Am I very, very beautiful, Chloe, so that men can’t help themselves?’

‘Very, madam.’

‘There, good-night. I want to be in bed, and I can’t kiss you because you keep calling me madam, and freeze me to icicles; but I do love you, Chloe.’

‘I am sure you do.’

‘I’m quite certain I do. I know I never mean harm. But how are we women expected to behave, then? Oh, I’m unhappy, I am.’

‘You must abstain from playing.’

‘It’s that! I’ve lost my money–I forgot. And I shall have to confess it to my duke, though he warned me. Old men hold their fingers up–so! One finger: and you never forget the sight of it, never. It’s a round finger, like the handle of a jug, and won’t point at you when they’re lecturing, and the skin’s like an old coat on gaffer’s shoulders–or, Chloe! just like, when you look at the nail, a rumpled counterpane up to the face of a corpse. I declare, it’s just like! I feel as if I didn’t a bit mind talking of corpses tonight. And my money’s gone, and I don’t much mind. I’m a wild girl again, handsomer than when that—-he is a dear, kind, good old nobleman, with his funny old finger: “Susan! Susan!” I’m no worse than others. Everybody plays here; everybody superior. Why, you have played, Chloe.’

‘Never!’

‘I’ve heard you say you played once, and a bigger stake it was, you said, than anybody ever did play.’

‘Not money.’

‘What then?’

‘My life.’

‘Goodness–yes! I understand. I understand everything to-night-men too. So you did!–They’re not so shamefully wicked, Chloe. Because I can’t see the wrong of human nature–if we’re discreet, I mean. Now and then a country dance and a game, and home to bed and dreams. There’s no harm in that, I vow. And that’s why you stayed at this place. You like it, Chloe?’

‘I am used to it.’

‘But when you’re married to Count Caseldy you’ll go?’

‘Yes, then.’

She uttered it so joylessly that Duchess Susan added, with intense affectionateness, ‘You’re not obliged to marry him, dear Chloe.’

‘Nor he me, madam.’

The duchess caught at her impulsively to kiss her, and said she would undress herself, as she wished to be alone.

From that night she was a creature inflamed.

CHAPTER VII

The total disappearance of the pair of heroes who had been the latest in the conspiracy to vex his delicate charge, gave Mr. Beamish a high opinion of Caseldy as an assistant in such an office as he held. They had gone, and nothing more was heard of them. Caseldy confined his observations on the subject to the remark that he had employed the best means to be rid of that kind of worthies; and whether their souls had fled, or only their bodies, was unknown. But the duchess had quiet promenades with Caseldy to guard her, while Mr. Beamish counted the remaining days of her visit with the impatience of a man having cause to cast eye on a clock. For Duchess Susan was not very manageable now; she had fits of insurgency, and plainly said that her time was short, and she meant to do as she liked, go where she liked, play when she liked, and be an independent woman–if she was so soon to be taken away and boxed in a castle that was only a bigger sedan.

Caseldy protested he was as helpless as the beau. He described the annoyance of his incessant running about at her heels in all directions amusingly, and suggested that she must be beating the district to recover her ‘strange cavalier,’ of whom, or of one that had ridden beside her carriage half a day on her journey to the Wells, he said she had dropped a sort of hint. He complained of the impossibility of his getting an hour in privacy with his Chloe.

‘And I, accustomed to consult with her, see too little of her,’ said Mr. Beamish. ‘I shall presently be seeing nothing, and already I am sensible of my loss.’

He represented his case to Duchess Susan:–that she was for ever driving out long distances and taking Chloe from him, when his occupation precluded his accompanying them; and as Chloe soon was to be lost to him for good, he deeply felt her absence.

The duchess flung him enigmatical rejoinders: ‘You can change all that, Mr. Beamish, if you like, and you know you can. Oh, yes, you can. But you like being a butterfly, and when you’ve made ladies pale you’re happy: and there they’re to stick and wither for you. Never!–I’ve that pride. I may be worried, but I’ll never sink to green and melancholy for a man.’

She bridled at herself in a mirror, wherein not a sign of paleness was reflected.

Mr. Beamish meditated, and he thought it prudent to speak to Caseldy manfully of her childish suspicions, lest she should perchance in like manner perturb the lover’s mind.

‘Oh, make your mind easy, my dear sir, as far as I am concerned,’ said Caseldy. ‘But, to tell you the truth, I think I can interpret her creamy ladyship’s innuendos a little differently and quite as clearly. For my part, I prefer the pale to the blowsy, and I stake my right hand on Chloe’s fidelity. Whatever harm I may have the senseless cruelty– misfortune, I may rather call it–to do that heavenly-minded woman in our days to come, none shall say of me that I was ever for an instant guilty of the baseness of doubting her purity and constancy. And, sir, I will add that I could perfectly rely also on your honour.’

Mr. Beamish bowed. ‘You do but do me justice. But, say, what interpretation?’

‘She began by fearing you,’ said Caseldy, creating a stare that was followed by a frown. ‘She fancies you neglect her. Perhaps she has a woman’s suspicion that you do it to try her.’

Mr. Beamish frenetically cited his many occupations. ‘How can I be ever dancing attendance on her?’ Then he said, ‘Pooh,’ and tenderly fingered the ruffles of his wrist. ‘Tush, tush,’ said he, ‘no, no: though if it came to a struggle between us, I might in the interests of my old friend, her lord, whom I have reasons for esteeming, interpose an influence that would make the exercise of my authority agreeable. Hitherto I have seen no actual need of it, and I watch keenly. Her eye has been on Colonel Poltermore once or twice his on her. The woman is a rose in June, sir, and I forgive the whole world for looking–and for longing too. But I have observed nothing serious.’

‘He is of our party to the beacon-head to-morrow,’ said Caseldy. ‘She insisted that she would have him; and at least it will grant me furlough for an hour.’

‘Do me the service to report to me,’ said Mr. Beamish.

In this fashion he engaged Caseldy to supply him with inventions, and prepared himself to swallow them. It was Poltermore and Poltermore, the Colonel here, the Colonel there until the chase grew so hot that Mr. Beamish could no longer listen to young Mr. Camwell’s fatiguing drone upon his one theme of the double-dealing of Chloe’s betrothed. He became of her way of thinking, and treated the young gentleman almost as coldly as she. In time he was ready to guess of his own acuteness that the ‘strange cavalier’ could have been no other than Colonel Poltermore. When Caseldy hinted it, Mr. Beamish said, ‘I have marked him.’ He added, in highly self-satisfied style, ‘With all your foreign training, my friend, you will learn that we English are not so far behind you in the art of unravelling an intrigue in the dark.’ To which Caseldy replied, that the Continental world had little to teach Mr. Beamish.

Poor Colonel Poltermore, as he came to be called, was clearly a victim of the sudden affability of Duchess Susan. The transformation of a stiff military officer into a nimble Puck, a runner of errands and a sprightly attendant, could not pass without notice. The first effect of her discriminating condescension on this unfortunate gentleman was to make him the champion of her claims to breeding. She had it by nature, she was Nature’s great lady, he would protest to the noble dames of the circle he moved in; and they admitted that she was different in every way from a bourgeoise elevated by marriage to lofty rank: she was not vulgar. But they remained doubtful of the perfect simplicity of a young woman who worked such changes in men as to render one of the famous conquerors of the day her agitated humble servant. By rapid degrees the Colonel had fallen to that. When not by her side, he was ever marching with sharp strides, hurrying through rooms and down alleys and groves until he had discovered and attached himself to her skirts. And, curiously, the object of his jealousy was the devoted Alonzo! Mr. Beamish laughed when he heard of it. The lady’s excitement and giddy mien, however, accused Poltermore of a stage of success requiring to be combated immediately. There was mention of Duchess Susan’s mighty wish to pay a visit to the popular fortune-teller of the hut on the heath, and Mr. Beamish put his veto on the expedition. She had obeyed him by abstaining from play of late, so he fully expected, that his interdict would be obeyed; and besides the fortune-teller was a rogue of a sham astrologer known to have foretold to certain tender ladies things they were only too desirous to imagine predestined by an extraordinary indication of the course of planets through the zodiac, thus causing them to sin by the example of celestial conjunctions–a piece of wanton impiety. The beau took high ground in his objections to the adventure. Nevertheless, Duchess Susan did go. She drove to the heath at an early hour of the morning, attended by Chloe, Colonel Poltermore, and Caseldy. They subsequently breakfasted at an inn where gipsy repasts were occasionally served to the fashion, and they were back at the wells as soon as the world was abroad. Their surprise then was prodigious when Mr. Beamish, accosting them full in assembly, inquired whether they were satisfied with the report of their fortunes, and yet more when he positively proved himself acquainted with the fortunes which had been recounted to each of them in privacy.

‘You, Colonel Poltermore, are to be in luck’s way up to the tenth milestone,–where your chariot will overset and you will be lamed for life.’

‘Not quite so bad,’ said the Colonel cheerfully, he having been informed of much better.

‘And you, Count Caseldy, are to have it all your own way with good luck, after committing a deed of slaughter, with the solitary penalty of undergoing a visit every night from the corpse.’

‘Ghost,’ Caseldy smilingly corrected him.

‘And Chloe would not have her fortune told, because she knew it!’ Mr. Beamish cast a paternal glance at her. ‘And you, madam,’ he bent his brows on the duchess, ‘received the communication that “All for Love” will sink you as it raised you, put you down as it took you up, furnish the feast to the raven gentleman which belongs of right to the golden eagle?’

‘Nothing of the sort! And I don’t believe in any of their stories,’ cried the duchess, with a burning face.

‘You deny it, madam?’

‘I do. There was never a word of a raven or an eagle, that I’ll swear, now.’

‘You deny that there was ever a word of “All for Love”? Speak, madam.’

‘Their conjuror’s rigmarole!’ she murmured, huffing. ‘As if I listened to their nonsense!’

‘Does the Duchess of Dewlap dare to give me the lie?’ said Mr. Beamish.

‘That’s not my title, and you know it,’ she retorted.

‘What’s this?’ the angry beau sang out. ‘What stuff is this you wear?’ He towered and laid hand on a border of lace of her morning dress, tore it furiously and swung a length of it round him: and while the duchess panted and trembled at an outrage that won for her the sympathy of every lady present as well as the championship of the gentlemen, he tossed the lace to the floor and trampled on it, making his big voice intelligible over the uproar: ‘Hear what she does! ‘Tis a felony! She wears the stuff with Betty Worcester’s yellow starch on it for mock antique! And let who else wears it strip it off before the town shall say we are disgraced– when I tell you that Betty Worcester was hanged at Tyburn yesterday morning for murder!’

There were shrieks.

Hardly had he finished speaking before the assembly began to melt; he stood in the centre like a pole unwinding streamers, amid a confusion of hurrying dresses, the sound and whirl and drift whereof was as that of the autumnal strewn leaves on a wind rising in November. The troops of ladies were off to bereave themselves of their fashionable imitation old lace adornment, which denounced them in some sort abettors and associates of the sanguinary loathed wretch, Mrs. Elizabeth Worcester, their benefactress of the previous day, now hanged and dangling on the gallows-tree.

Those ladies who wore not imitation lace or any lace in the morning, were scarcely displeased with the beau for his exposure of them that did. The gentlemen were confounded by his exhibition of audacious power. The two gentlemen nighest upon violently resenting his brutality to Duchess Susan, led her from the room in company with Chloe.

‘The woman shall fear me to good purpose,’ Mr. Beamish said to himself.

CHAPTER VIII

Mr. Camwell was in the ante-room as Chloe passed out behind the two incensed supporters of Duchess Susan.

‘I shall be by the fir-trees on the Mount at eight this evening,’ she said.

‘I will be there,’ he replied.

‘Drive Mr. Beamish into the country, that these gentlemen may have time to cool.’

He promised her it should be done.

Close on the hour of her appointment, he stood under the fir-trees, admiring the sunset along the western line of hills, and when Chloe joined him he spoke of the beauty of the scene.

‘Though nothing seems more eloquently to say farewell,’ he added, with a sinking voice.

‘We could say it now, and be friends,’ she answered.

‘Later than now, you think it unlikely that you could forgive me, Chloe.’

‘In truth, sir, you are making it hard for me.’

‘I have stayed here to keep watch; for no pleasure of my own,’ said he.

‘Mr. Beamish is an excellent protector of the duchess.’

‘Excellent; and he is cleverly taught to suppose she fears him greatly; and when she offends him, he makes a display of his Jupiter’s awfulness, with the effect on woman of natural spirit which you have seen, and others had foreseen, that she is exasperated and grows reckless. Tie another knot in your string, Chloe.’

She looked away, saying, ‘Were you not the cause? You were in collusion with that charlatan of the heath, who told them their fortunes this morning. I see far, both in the dark and in the light.’

‘But not through a curtain. I was present.’

‘Hateful, hateful business of the spy! You have worked a great mischief Mr. Camwell. And how can you reconcile it to, your conscience that you should play so base a part?’

‘I have but performed my duty, dear madam.’

‘You pretend that it is your devotion to me! I might be flattered if I saw not so abject a figure in my service. Now have I but four days of my month of happiness remaining, and my request to you is, leave me to enjoy them. I beseech you to go. Very humbly, most earnestly, I beg your departure. Grant it to me, and do not stay to poison my last days here. Leave us to-morrow. I will admit your good intentions. I give you my hand in gratitude. Adieu, Mr. Camwell.’

He took her hand. ‘Adieu. I foresee an early separation, and this dear hand is mine while I have it in mine. Adieu. It is a word to be repeated at a parting like ours. We do not blow out our light with one breath: we let it fade gradually, like yonder sunset.’

‘Speak so,’ said she.

‘Ah, Chloe, to give one’s life! And it is your happiness I have sought more than your favor.’

‘I believe it; but I have not liked the means. You leave us to-morrow?’

‘It seems to me that to-morrow is the term.’

Her face clouded. ‘That tells me a very uncertain promise.’

‘You looked forth to a month of happiness–meaning a month of delusion. The delusion expires to-night. You will awaken to see your end of it in the morning. You have never looked beyond the month since the day of his arrival.’

‘Let him not be named, I supplicate you.’

‘Then you consent that another shall be sacrificed for you to enjoy your state of deception an hour longer?’

‘I am not deceived, sir. I wish for peace, and crave it, and that is all I would have.’

‘And you make her your peace-offering, whom you have engaged to serve! Too surely your eyes have been open as well as mine. Knot by knot– I have watched you–where is it?–you have marked the points in that silken string where the confirmation of a just suspicion was too strong for you.’

‘I did it, and still I continued merry?’ She subsided from her scornfulness on an involuntary ‘Ah!’ that was a shudder.

‘You acted Light Heart, madam, and too well to hoodwink me. Meanwhile you allowed that mischief to proceed, rather than have your crazy lullaby disturbed.’

‘Indeed, Mr. Camwell, you presume.’

‘The time, and my knowledge of what it is fraught with, demand it and excuse it. You and I, my dear and one only love on earth, stand outside of ordinary rules. We are between life and death.’

‘We are so always.’

‘Listen further to the preacher: We have them close on us, with the question, Which it shall be to-morrow. You are for sleeping on, but I say no; nor shall that iniquity of double treachery be committed because of your desire to be rocked in a cradle. Hear me out. The drug you have swallowed to cheat yourself will not bear the shock awaiting you tomorrow with the first light. Hear these birds! When next they sing, you will be broad awake, and of me, and the worship and service I would have dedicated to you, I do not . . . it is a spectral sunset of a day that was never to be!–awake, and looking on what? Back from a monstrous villainy to the forlorn wretch who winked at it with knots in a string. Count them then, and where will be your answer to heaven? I begged it of you, to save you from those blows of remorse; yes, terrible!’

‘Oh, no!’

‘Terrible, I say!’

‘You are mistaken, Mr. Camwell. It is my soother. I tell my beads on it.’

‘See how a persistent residence in this place has made a Pagan of the purest soul among us! Had you . . . but that day was not to lighten me! More adorable in your errors that you are than others by their virtues, you have sinned through excess of the qualities men prize. Oh, you have a boundless generosity, unhappily enwound with a pride as great. There is your fault, that is the cause of your misery. Too generous! too proud! You have trusted, and you will not cease to trust; you have vowed yourself to love, never to remonstrate, never to seem to doubt; it is too much your religion, rare verily. But bethink you of that inexperienced and most silly good creature who is on the rapids to her destruction. Is she not–you will cry it aloud to-morrow–your victim? You hear it within you now.’

‘Friend, my dear, true friend,’ Chloe said in her deeper voice of melody, ‘set your mind at ease about to-morrow and her. Her safety is assured. I stake my life on it. She shall not be a victim. At the worst she will but have learnt a lesson. So, then, adieu! The West hangs like a garland of unwatered flowers, neglected by the mistress they adorned. Remember the scene, and that here we parted, and that Chloe wished you the happiness it was out of her power to bestow, because she was of another world, with her history written out to the last red streak before ever you knew her. Adieu; this time adieu for good!

Mr. Camwell stood in her path. ‘Blind eyes, if you like,’ he said, ‘but you shall not hear blind language. I forfeit the poor consideration for me that I have treasured; hate me; better hated by you than shun my duty! Your duchess is away at the first dawn this next morning; it has come to that. I speak with full knowledge. Question her.’

Chloe threw a faltering scorn of him into her voice, as much as her heart’s sharp throbs would allow. ‘I question you, sir, how you came to this full knowledge you boast of?’

‘I have it; let that suffice. Nay, I will be particular; his coach is ordered for the time I name to you; her maid is already at a station on the road of the flight.’

‘You have their servants in your pay?’

‘For the mine–the countermine. We must grub dirt to match deceivers. You, madam, have chosen to be delicate to excess, and have thrown it upon me to be gross, and if you please, abominable, in my means of defending you. It is not too late for you to save the lady, nor too late to bring him to the sense of honour.’

‘I cannot think Colonel Poltermore so dishonourable.’

‘Poor Colonel Poltermore! The office he is made to fill is an old one. Are you not ashamed, Chloe?’

‘I have listened too long,’ she replied.

‘Then, if it is your pleasure, depart.’

He made way for her. She passed him. Taking two hurried steps in the gloom of the twilight, she stopped, held at her heart, and painfully turning to him, threw her arms out, and let herself be seized and kissed.

On his asking pardon of her, which his long habit of respect forced him to do in the thick of rapture and repetitions, she said, ‘You rob no one.’

‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘there is a reward, then, for faithful love. But am I the man I was a minute back? I have you; I embrace you; and I doubt that I am I. Or is it Chloe’s ghost?’

‘She has died and visits you.’

‘And will again?’

Chloe could not speak for languor.

The intensity of the happiness she gave by resting mutely where she was, charmed her senses. But so long had the frost been on them that their awakening to warmth was haunted by speculations on the sweet taste of this reward of faithfulness to him, and the strange taste of her own unfaithfulness to her. And reflecting on the cold act of speculation while strong arm and glowing mouth were pressing her, she thought her senses might really be dead, and she a ghost visiting the good youth for his comfort. So feel ghosts, she thought, and what we call happiness in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance. Another thought flew through her like a mortal shot: ‘Not so with those two! with them it will be ecstasy meeting ecstasy; they will take and give happiness in equal portions.’ A pang of jealousy traversed her frame. She made the shrewdness of it help to nerve her fervour in a last strain of him to her bosom, and gently releasing herself, she said, ‘No one is robbed. And now, dear friend, promise me that you will not disturb Mr. Beamish.’

‘Chloe,’ said he, ‘have you bribed me?’

‘I do not wish him to be troubled.’

‘The duchess, I have told you–‘

‘I know. But you have Chloe’s word that she will watch over the duchess and die to save her. It is an oath. You have heard of some arrangements. I say they shall lead to nothing: it shall not take place. Indeed, my friend, I am awake; I see as much as you see. And those. . . after being where I have been, can you suppose I have a regret? But she is my dear and peculiar charge, and if she runs a risk, trust to me that there shall be no catastrophe; I swear it; so, now, adieu. We sup in company to-night. They will be expecting some of Chloe’s verses, and she must sing to herself for a few minutes to stir the bed her songs take wing from; therefore, we will part, and for her sake avoid her; do not be present at our table, or in the room, or anywhere there. Yes, you rob no one,’ she said, in a voice that curled through him deliciously by wavering; but I think I may blush at recollections, and I would rather have you absent. Adieu! I will not ask for obedience from you beyond to-night. Your word?’

He gave it in a stupor of felicity, and she fled.

CHAPTER IX

Chloe drew the silken string from her bosom, as she descended the dim pathway through the furies, and set her fingers travelling along it for the number of the knots. ‘I have no right to be living,’ she said. Seven was the number; seven years she had awaited her lover’s return; she counted her age and completed it in sevens. Fatalism had sustained her during her lover’s absence; it had fast hold of her now. Thereby had she been enabled to say, ‘He will come’; and saying, ‘He has come,’ her touch rested on the first knot in the string. She had no power to displace her fingers, and the cause of the tying of the knot stood across her brain marked in dull red characters, legible neither to her eye nor to her understanding, but a reviving of the hour that brought it on her spirit with human distinctness, except of the light of day: she had a sense of having forfeited light, and seeing perhaps more clearly. Everything assured her that she saw more clearly than others; she saw too when it was good to cease to live.

Hers was the unhappy lot of one gifted with poet-imagination to throb with the woman supplanting her and share the fascination of the man who deceived. At their first meeting, in her presence, she had seen that they were not strangers; she pitied them for speaking falsely, and when she vowed to thwart this course of evil it to save a younger creature of her sex, not in rivalry. She treated them both with a proud generosity surpassing gentleness. All that there was of selfishness in her bosom resolved to the enjoyment of her one month of strongly willed delusion.

The kiss she had sunk to robbed no one, not even her body’s purity, for when this knot was tied she consigned herself to her end, and had become a bag of dust. The other knots in the string pointed to verifications; this first one was a suspicion, and it was the more precious, she felt it to be more a certainty; it had come from the dark world beyond us, where all is known. Her belief that it had come thence was nourished by testimony, the space of blackness wherein she had lived since, exhausting her last vitality in a simulation of infantile happiness, which was nothing other than the carrying on of her emotion of the moment of sharp sour sweet–such as it may be, the doomed below attain for their knowledge of joy–when, at the first meeting with her lover, the perception of his treachery to the soul confiding in him, told her she had lived, and opened out the cherishable kingdom of insensibility to her for her heritage.

She made her tragic humility speak thankfully to the wound that slew her. ‘Had it not been so, I should not have seen him,’ she said:–Her lover would not have come to her but for his pursuit of another woman.

She pardoned him for being attracted by that beautiful transplant of the fields: pardoned her likewise. ‘He when I saw him first was as beautiful to me. For him I might have done as much.’

Far away in a lighted hall of the West, her family raised hands of reproach. They were minute objects, keenly discerned as diminished figures cut in steel. Feeling could not be very warm for them, they were so small, and a sea that had drowned her ran between; and looking that way she had scarce any warmth of feeling save for a white rhaiadr leaping out of broken cloud through branched rocks, where she had climbed and dreamed when a child. The dream was then of the coloured days to come; now she was more infant in her mind, and she watched the scattered water broaden, and tasted the spray, sat there drinking the scene, untroubled by hopes as a lamb, different only from an infant in knowing that she had thrown off life to travel back to her home and be refreshed. She heard her people talk; they were unending babblers in the waterfall. Truth was with them, and wisdom. How, then, could she pretend to any right to live? Already she had no name; she was less living than a tombstone. For who was Chloe? Her family might pass the grave of Chloe without weeping, without moralizing. They had foreseen her ruin, they had foretold it, they noised it in the waters, and on they sped to the plains, telling the world of their prophecy, and making what was untold as yet a lighter thing to do.

The lamps in an irregularly dotted line underneath the hill beckoned her to her task of appearing as the gayest of them that draw their breath for the day and have pulses for the morrow.

CHAPTER X

At midnight the great supper party to celebrate the reconciliation of Mr. Beamish and Duchess Susan broke up, and beneath a soft fair sky the ladies, with their silvery chatter of gratitude for amusement, caught Chloe in their arms to kiss her, rendering it natural for their cavaliers to exclaim that Chloe was blest above mortals. The duchess preferred to walk. Her spirits were excited, and her language smelt of her origin, but the superb fleshly beauty of the woman was aglow, and crying, ‘I declare I should burst in one of those boxes–just as if you’d stalled me!’ she fanned a wind on her face, and sumptuously spread her spherical skirts, attended by the vanquished and captive Colonel Poltermore, a gentleman manifestly bent on insinuating sly slips of speech to serve for here a pinch of powder, there a match. ‘Am I?’ she was heard to say. She blew prodigious deep-chested sighs of a coquette that has taken to roaring.

Presently her voice tossed out: ‘As if I would!’ These vivid illuminations of the Colonel’s proceedings were a pasture to the rearward groups, composed of two very grand ladies, Caseldy, Mr. Beamish, a lord, and Chloe.

‘You man! Oh!’ sprang from the duchess. ‘What do I hear? I won’t listen; I can’t, I mustn’t, I oughtn’t.’

So she said, but her head careened, she gave him her coy reluctant ear, with total abandonment to the seductions of his whispers, and the lord let fly a peal of laughter. It had been a supper of copious wine, and the songs which rise from wine. Nature was excused by our midnight naturalists.

The two great dames, admonished by the violence of the nobleman’s laughter, laid claim on Mr. Beamish to accompany them at their parting with Chloe and Duchess Susan.

In the momentary shuffling of couples incident to adieux among a company, the duchess murmured to Caseldy:

‘Have I done it well.’

He praised her for perfection in her acting. ‘I am at your door at three, remember.’

‘My heart’s in my mouth,’ said she.

Colonel Poltermore still had the privilege of conducting her the few farther steps to her lodgings.

Caseldy walked beside Chloe, and silently, until he said, ‘If I have not yet mentioned the subject–‘

‘If it is an allusion to money let me not hear it to-night,’ she replied.

‘I can only say that my lawyers have instructions. But my lawyers cannot pay you in gratitude. Do not think me in your hardest review of my misconduct ungrateful. I have ever esteemed you above all women; I do, and I shall; you are too much above me. I am afraid I am a composition of bad stuff; I did not win a very particularly good name on the Continent; I begin to know myself, and in comparison with you, dear Catherine—-‘

‘You speak to Chloe,’ she said. ‘Catherine is a buried person. She died without pain. She is by this time dust.’

The man heaved his breast. ‘Women have not an idea of our temptations.’

‘You are excused by me for all your errors, Caseldy. Always remember that.’

He sighed profoundly. ‘Ay, you have a Christian’s heart.’

She answered, ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is a Pagan’s.’

‘As for me,’ he rejoined, ‘I am a fatalist. Through life I have seen my destiny. What is to be, will be; we can do nothing.’

‘I have heard of one who expired of a surfeit that he anticipated, nay proclaimed, when indulging in the last desired morsel,’ said Chloe.

‘He was driven to it.’

‘From within.’

Caseldy acquiesced; his wits were clouded, and an illustration even coarser and more grotesque would have won a serious nod and a sigh from him. ‘Yes, we are moved by other hands!’

‘It is pleasant to think so: and think it of me tomorrow. Will you!’ said Chloe.

He promised it heartily, to induce her to think the same of him.

Their separation was in no way remarkable. The pretty formalities were executed at the door, and the pair of gentlemen departed.

‘It’s quite dark still,’ Duchess Susan said, looking up at the sky, and she ran upstairs, and sank, complaining of the weakness of her legs, in a chair of the ante-chamber of her bedroom, where Chloe slept. Then she asked the time of the night. She could not suppress her hushed ‘Oh!’ of heavy throbbing from minute to minute. Suddenly she started off at a quick stride to her own room, saying that it must be sleepiness which affected her so.

Her bedroom had a door to the sitting-room, and thence, as also from Chloe’s room, the landing on the stairs was reached, for the room ran parallel with both bed-chambers. She walked in it and threw the window open, but closed it immediately; opened and shut the door, and returned and called for Chloe. She wanted to be read to. Chloe named certain composing books. The duchess chose a book of sermons. ‘But we’re all such dreadful sinners, it’s better not to bother ourselves late at night.’ She dismissed that suggestion. Chloe proposed books of poetry. ‘Only I don’t understand them except about larks, and buttercups, and hayfields, and that’s no comfort to a woman burning,’ was the answer.

‘Are you feverish, madam?’ said Chloe. And the duchess was sharp on her: ‘Yes, madam, I am.’

She reproved herself in a change of tone: ‘No, Chloe, not feverish, only this air of yours here is such an exciting air, as the doctor says; and they made me drink wine, and I played before supper–Oh! my money; I used to say I could get more, but now!’ she sighed–‘but there’s better in the world than money. You know that, don’t you, you dear? Tell me. And I want you to be happy; that you’ll find. I do wish we could all be!’ She wept, and spoke of requiring a little music to compose her.

Chloe stretched a hand for her guitar. Duchess Susan listened to some notes, and cried that it went to her heart and hurt her. ‘Everything we like a lot has a fence and a board against trespassers, because of such a lot of people in the world,’ she moaned. ‘Don’t play, put down that thing, please, dear. You’re the cleverest creature anybody has ever met; they all say so. I wish I—-Lovely women catch men, and clever women keep them: I’ve heard that said in this wretched place, and it ‘s a nice prospect for me, next door to a fool! I know I am.’

‘The duke adores you, madam.’

‘Poor duke! Do let him be–sleeping so woebegone with his mouth so, and that chin of a baby, like as if he dreamed of a penny whistle. He shouldn’t have let me come here. Talk of Mr. Beamish. How he will miss you, Chloe!’

‘He will,’ Chloe said sadly.

‘If you go, dear.’

‘I am going.’

‘Why should you leave him, Chloe?’

‘I must.’

‘And there, the thought of it makes you miserable!’

‘It does.’

‘You needn’t, I’m sure.’

Chloe looked at her.

The duchess turned her head. ‘Why can’t you be gay, as you were at the supper-table, Chloe? You’re out to him like a flower when the sun jumps over the hill; you’re up like a lark in the dews; as I used to be when I thought of nothing. Oh, the early morning; and I’m sleepy. What a beast I feel, with my grandeur, and the time in an hour or two for the birds to sing, and me ready to drop. I must go and undress.’

She rushed on Chloe, kissed her hastily, declaring that she was quite dead of fatigue, and dismissed her. ‘I don’t want help, I can undress myself. As if Susan Barley couldn’t do that for herself! and you may shut your door, I sha’n’t have any frights to-night, I’m so tired out.’

‘Another kiss,’ Chloe said tenderly.

‘Yes, take it’–the duchess leaned her cheek–‘but I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m doing.’

‘It will not be on your conscience,’ Chloe answered, kissing her warmly.

Will those words she withdrew, and the duchess closed the door. She ran a bolt in it immediately.

‘I’m too tired to know anything I’m doing,’ she said to herself, and stood with shut eyes to hug certain thoughts which set her bosom heaving.

There was the bed, there was the clock. She had the option of lying down and floating quietly into the day, all peril past. It seemed sweet for a minute. But it soon seemed an old, a worn, an end-of-autumn life, chill, without aim, like a something that was hungry and toothless. The bed proposing innocent sleep repelled her and drove her to the clock. The clock was awful: the hand at the hour, the finger following the minute, commanded her to stir actively, and drove her to gentle meditations on the bed. She lay down dressed, after setting her light beside the clock, that she might see it at will, and considering it necessary for the bed to appear to have been lain on. Considering also that she ought to be heard moving about in the process of undressing, she rose from the bed to make sure of her reading of the guilty clock. An hour and twenty minutes! she had no more time than that: and it was not enough for her various preparations, though it was true that her maid had packed and taken a box of the things chiefly needful; but the duchess had to change her shoes and her dress, and run at bo-peep with the changes of her mind, a sedative preface to any fatal step among women of her complexion, for so they invite indecision to exhaust their scruples, and they let the blood have its way. Having so short a space of time, she thought the matter decided, and with some relief she flung despairing on the bed, and lay down for good with her duke. In a little while her head was at work reviewing him sternly, estimating him not less accurately than the male moralist charitable to her sex would do. She quitted the bed, with a spring to escape her imagined lord; and as if she had felt him to be there, she lay down no more. A quiet life like that was flatter to her idea than a handsomely bound big book without any print on the pages, and without a picture. Her contemplation of it, contrasted with the life waved to her view by the timepiece, set her whole system rageing; she burned to fly. Providently, nevertheless, she thumped a pillow, and threw the bedclothes into proper disorder, to inform the world that her limbs had warmed them, and that all had been impulse with her. She then proceeded to disrobe, murmuring to herself that she could stop now, and could stop now, at each stage of the advance to a fresh dressing of her person, and moralizing on her singular fate, in the mouth of an observer. ‘She was shot up suddenly over everybody’s head, and suddenly down she went.’ Susan whispered to herself: ‘But it was for love!’ Possessed by the rosiness of love, she finished her business, with an attention to everything needed that was equal to perfect serenity of mind. After which there was nothing to do, save to sit humped in a chair, cover her face and count the clock-tickings, that said, Yes–no; do–don’t; fly– stay; fly–fly! It seemed to her she heard a moving. Well she might with that dreadful heart of hers!

Chloe was asleep, at peace by this time, she thought; and how she envied Chloe! She might be as happy, if she pleased. Why not? But what kind of happiness was it? She likened it to that of the corpse underground, and shrank distastefully.

Susan stood at her glass to have a look at the creature about whom there was all this disturbance, and she threw up her arms high for a languid, not unlovely yawn, that closed in blissful shuddering with the sensation of her lover’s arms having wormed round her waist and taken her while she was defenceless. For surely they would. She took a jewelled ring, his gift, from her purse, and kissed it, and drew it on and off her finger, leaving it on. Now she might wear it without fear of inquiries and virtuous eyebrows. O heavenly now–if only it were an hour hence; and going behind galloping horses!

The clock was at the terrible moment. She hesitated internally and hastened; once her feet stuck fast, and firmly she said, ‘No’; but the clock was her lord. The clock was her lover and her lord; and obeying it, she managed to get into the sitting-room, on the pretext that she merely wished to see through the front window whether daylight was coming.

How well she knew that half-light of the ebb of the wave of darkness.

Strange enough it was to see it showing houses regaining their solidity of the foregone day, instead of still fields, black hedges, familiar shapes of trees. The houses had no wakefulness, they were but seen to stand, and the light was a revelation of emptiness. Susan’s heart was cunning to reproach her duke for the difference of the scene she beheld from that of the innocent open-breasted land. Yes, it was dawn in a wicked place that she never should have been allowed to visit. But where was he whom she looked for? There! The cloaked figure of a man was at the corner of the street. It was he. Her heart froze; but her limbs were strung to throw off the house, and reach air, breathe, and (as her thoughts ran) swoon, well-protected. To her senses the house was a house on fire, and crying to her to escape.

Yet she stepped deliberately, to be sure-footed in a dusky room; she touched along the wall and came to the door, where a foot-stool nearly tripped her. Here her touch was at fault, for though she knew she must be close by the door, she was met by an obstruction unlike wood, and the door seemed neither shut nor open. She could not find the handle; something hung over it. Thinking coolly, she fancied the thing must be a gown or dressing-gown; it hung heavily. Her fingers were sensible of the touch of silk; she distinguished a depending bulk, and she felt at it very carefully and mechanically, saying within herself, in her anxiety to pass it without noise, ‘If I should awake poor Chloe, of all people!’ Her alarm was that the door might creak. Before any other alarm had struck her brain, the hand she felt with was in a palsy, her mouth gaped, her throat thickened, the dust-ball rose in her throat, and the effort to swallow it down and get breath kept her from acute speculation while she felt again, pinched, plucked at the thing, ready to laugh, ready to shriek. Above her head, all on one side, the thing had a round white top. Could it be a hand that her touch had slid across? An arm too! this was an arm! She clutched it, imagining that it clung to her. She pulled it to release herself from it, desperately she pulled, and a lump descended, and a flash of all the torn nerves of her body told her that a dead human body was upon her.

At a quarter to four o’clock of a midsummer morning, as Mr. Beamish relates of his last share in the Tale of Chloe, a woman’s voice, in piercing notes of anguish, rang out three shrieks consecutively, which were heard by him at the instant of his quitting his front doorstep, in obedience to the summons of young Mr. Camwell, delivered ten minutes previously, with great urgency, by that gentleman’s lacquey. On his reaching the street of the house inhabited by Duchess Susan, he perceived many night-capped heads at windows, and one window of the house in question lifted but vacant. His first impression accused the pair of gentlemen, whom he saw bearing drawn swords in no friendly attitude of an ugly brawl that had probably affrighted her Grace, or her personal attendant, a woman capable of screaming, for he was well assured that it could not have been Chloe, the least likely of her sex to abandon herself to the use of their weapons either in terror or in jeopardy. The antagonists were Mr. Camwell and Count Caseldy. On his approaching them, Mr. Camwell sheathed his sword, saying that his work was done. Caseldy was convulsed with wrath, to such a degree as to make the part of an intermediary perilous. There had been passes between them, and Caseldy cried aloud that he would have his enemy’s blood. The night-watch was nowhere. Soon, however, certain shopmen and their apprentices assisted Mr. Beamish to preserve the peace, despite the fury of Caseldy and the provocations–‘not easy to withstand,’ says the chronicler–offered by him to young Camwell. The latter said to Mr. Beamish: ‘I knew I should be no match, so I sent for you,’ causing his friend astonishment, inasmuch as he was assured of the youth’s natural valour.

Mr. Beamish was about to deliver an allocution of reproof to them in equal shares, being entirely unsuspicious of any other reason for the alarum than this palpable outbreak of a rivalry that he would have inclined to attribute to the charms of Chloe, when the house-door swung wide for them to enter, and the landlady of the house, holding clasped hands at full stretch, implored them to run up to the poor lady: ‘Oh, she’s dead; she’s dead, dead!’

Caseldy rushed past her.

‘How, dead! good woman?’ Mr. Beamish questioned her most incredulously, half-smiling.

She answered among her moans: ‘Dead by the neck; off the door–Oh!’

Young Camwell pressed his forehead, with a call on his Maker’s name. As they reached the landing upstairs, Caseldy came out of the sitting-room.

‘Which?’ said Camwell to the speaking of his face.

‘She !’ said the other.

‘The duchess?’ Mr. Beamish exclaimed.

But Camwell walked into the room. He had nothing to ask after that reply.

The figure stretched along the floor was covered with a sheet. The young man fell at his length beside it, and his face was downward.

Mr. Beamish relates: ‘To this day, when I write at an interval of fifteen years, I have the tragic ague of that hour in my blood, and I behold the shrouded form of the most admirable of women, whose heart was broken by a faithless man ere she devoted her wreck of life to arrest one weaker than herself on the descent to perdition. Therein it was beneficently granted her to be of the service she prayed to be through her death. She died to save. In a last letter, found upon her pincushion, addressed to me under seal of secrecy toward the parties principally concerned, she anticipates the whole confession of the unhappy duchess. Nay, she prophesies: “The duchess will tell you truly she has had enough of love!” Those actual words were reiterated to me by the poor lady daily until her lord arrived to head the funeral procession, and assist in nursing back the shattered health of his wife to a state that should fit her for travelling. To me, at least, she was constant in repeating, “No more of love!” By her behaviour to her duke, I can judge her to have been sincere. She spoke of feeling Chloe’s eyes go through her with every word of hers that she recollected. Nor was the end of Chloe less effective upon the traitor. He was in the procession to her grave. He spoke to none. There is a line of the verse bearing the superscription, “My Reasons for Dying,” that shows her to have been apprehensive to secure the safety of Mr. Camwell:

I die because my heart is dead To warn a soul from sin I die: I die that blood may not be shed, etc.

She feared he would be somewhere on the road to mar the fugitives, and she knew him, as indeed he knew himself, no match for one trained in the foreign tricks of steel, ready though he was to dispute the traitor’s way. She remembers Mr. Camwell’s petition for the knotted silken string in her request that it shall be cut from her throat and given to him.’

Mr. Beamish indulges in verses above the grave of Chloe. They are of a character to cool emotion. But when we find a man, who is commonly of the quickest susceptibility to ridicule as well as to what is befitting, careless of exposure, we may reflect on the truthfulness of feeling by which he is drawn to pass his own guard and come forth in his nakedness; something of the poet’s tongue may breathe to us through his mortal stammering, even if we have to acknowledge that a quotation would scatter pathos.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

All flattery is at somebody’s expense Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues But I leave it to you
Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war Happiness in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance If I do not speak of payment
Intellectual contempt of easy dupes Invite indecision to exhaust their scruples Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask for? No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters Nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted Primitive appetite for noise
She might turn out good, if well guarded for a time The alternative is, a garter and the bedpost They miss their pleasure in pursuing it
This mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure Wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land

THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH

By George Meredith

A REALISTIC TALE

CHAPTER I

The experience of great officials who have laid down their dignities before death, or have had the philosophic mind to review themselves while still wielding the deputy sceptre, teaches them that in the exercise of authority over men an eccentric behaviour in trifles has most exposed them to hostile criticism and gone farthest to jeopardize their popularity. It is their Achilles’ heel; the place where their mother Nature holds them as she dips them in our waters. The eccentricity of common persons is the entertainment of the multitude, and the maternal hand is perceived for a cherishing and endearing sign upon them; but rarely can this be found suitable for the august in station; only, indeed, when their sceptre is no more fearful than a grandmother’s birch; and these must learn from it sooner or later that they are uncomfortably mortal.

When herrings are at auction on a beach, for example, the man of chief distinction in the town should not step in among a poor fraternity to take advantage of an occasion of cheapness, though it be done, as he may protest, to relieve the fishermen of a burden; nor should such a dignitary as the bailiff of a Cinque Port carry home the spoil of victorious bargaining on his arm in a basket. It is not that his conduct is in itself objectionable, so much as that it causes him to be popularly weighed; and during life, until the best of all advocates can plead before our fellow Englishmen that we are out of their way, it is prudent to avoid the process.

Mr. Tinman, however, this high-stepping person in question, happened to have come of a marketing mother. She had started him from a small shop to a big one. He, by the practice of her virtues, had been enabled to start himself as a gentleman. He was a man of this ambition, and prouder behind it. But having started himself precipitately, he took rank among independent incomes, as they are called, only to take fright at the perils of starvation besetting one who has been tempted to abandon the source of fifty per cent. So, if noble imagery were allowable in our time in prose, might alarms and partial regrets be assumed to animate the splendid pumpkin cut loose from the suckers. Deprived of that prodigious nourishment of the shop in the fashionable seaport of Helmstone, he retired upon his native town, the Cinque Port of Crikswich, where he rented the cheapest residence he could discover for his habitation, the House on the Beach, and lived imposingly, though not in total disaccord with his old mother’s principles. His income, as he observed to his widowed sister and solitary companion almost daily in their privacy, was respectable. The descent from an altitude of fifty to five per cent. cannot but be felt. Nevertheless it was a comforting midnight bolster reflection for a man, turning over to the other side between a dream and a wink, that he was making no bad debts, and one must pay to be addressed as esquire. Once an esquire, you are off the ground in England and on the ladder. An esquire can offer his hand in marriage to a lady in her own right; plain esquires have married duchesses; they marry baronets’ daughters every day of the week.

Thoughts of this kind were as the rise and fall of waves in the bosom of the new esquire. How often in his Helmstone shop had he not heard titled ladies disdaining to talk a whit more prettily than ordinary women; and he had been a match for the subtlety of their pride–he understood it. He knew well that at the hint of a proposal from him they would have spoken out in a manner very different to that of ordinary women. The lightning, only to be warded by an esquire, was in them. He quitted business at the age of forty, that he might pretend to espousals with a born lady; or at least it was one of the ideas in his mind.

And here, I think, is the moment for the epitaph of anticipation over him, and the exclamation, alas! I would not be premature, but it is necessary to create some interest in him, and no one but a foreigner could feel it at present for the Englishman who is bursting merely to do like the rest of his countrymen, and rise above them to shake them class by class as the dust from his heels. Alas! then an–undertaker’s pathos is better than none at all–he was not a single-minded aspirant to our social honours. The old marketing mother; to whom he owed his fortunes, was in his blood to confound his ambition; and so contradictory was the man’s nature, that in revenge for disappointments, there were times when he turned against the saving spirit of parsimony. Readers deep in Greek dramatic writings will see the fatal Sisters behind the chair of a man who gives frequent and bigger dinners, that he may become important in his neighbourhood, while decreasing the price he pays for his wine, that he may miserably indemnify himself for the outlay. A sip of his wine fetched the breath, as when men are in the presence of the tremendous elements of nature. It sounded the constitution more darkly-awful, and with a profounder testimony to stubborn health, than the physician’s instruments. Most of the guests at Mr. Tinman’s table were so constructed that they admired him for its powerful quality the more at his announcement of the price of it; the combined strength and cheapness probably flattering them, as by another mystic instance of the national energy. It must have been so, since his townsmen rejoiced to hail him as head of their town. Here and there a solitary esquire, fished out of the bathing season to dine at the house on the beach, was guilty of raising one of those clamours concerning subsequent headaches, which spread an evil reputation as a pall. A resident esquire or two, in whom a reminiscence of Tinman’s table may be likened to the hook which some old trout has borne away from the angler as the most vivid of warnings to him to beware for the future, caught up the black report and propagated it.

The Lieutenant of the Coastguard, hearing the latest conscious victim, or hearing of him, would nod his head and say he had never dined at Tinman’s table without a headache ensuing and a visit to the chemist’s shop; which, he was assured, was good for trade, and he acquiesced, as it was right to do in a man devoted to his country. He dined with Tinman again. We try our best to be social. For eight months in our year he had little choice but to dine with Tinman or be a hermit attached to a telescope.

“Where are you going, Lieutenant?” His frank reply to the question was, “I am going to be killed;” and it grew notorious that this meant Tinman’s table. We get on together as well as we can. Perhaps if we were an acutely calculating people we should find it preferable both for trade and our physical prosperity to turn and kill Tinman, in contempt of consequences. But we are not, and so he does the business gradually for us. A generous people we must be, for Tinman was not detested. The recollection of “next morning” caused him to be dimly feared.

Tinman, meanwhile, was awake only to the Circumstance that he made no progress as an esquire, except on the envelopes of letters, and in his own esteem. That broad region he began to occupy to the exclusion of other inhabitants; and the result of such a state of princely isolation was a plunge of his whole being into deep thoughts. From the hour of his investiture as the town’s chief man, thoughts which were long shots took possession of him. He had his wits about him; he was alive to ridicule; he knew he was not popular below, or on easy terms with people above him, and he meditated a surpassing stroke as one of the Band of Esq., that had nothing original about it to perplex and annoy the native mind, yet was dazzling. Few members of the privileged Band dare even imagine the thing.

It will hardly be believed, but it is historical fact, that in the act of carrying fresh herrings home on his arm, he entertained the idea of a visit to the First Person and Head of the realm, and was indulging in pleasing visions of the charms of a personal acquaintance. Nay, he had already consulted with brother jurats. For you must know that one of the princesses had recently suffered betrothal in the newspapers, and supposing her to deign to ratify the engagement, what so reasonable on the part of a Cinque Port chieftain as to congratulate his liege mistress, her illustrious mother? These are thoughts and these are deeds >which give emotional warmth and colour to the ejecter members of a population wretchedly befogged. They are our sunlight, and our brighter theme of conversation. They are necessary to the climate and the Saxon mind; and it would be foolish to put them away, as it is foolish not to do our utmost to be intimate with terrestrial splendours while we have them–as it may be said of wardens, mayors, and bailiffs-at command. Tinman was quite of this opinion. They are there to relieve our dulness. We have them in the place of heavenly; and he would have argued that we have a right to bother them too. He had a notion, up in the clouds, of a Sailors’ Convalescent Hospital at Crikswich to seduce a prince with, hand him the trowel, make him “lay the stone,” and then poor prince! refresh him at table. But that was a matter for by and by.

His purchase of herrings completed, Mr. Tinman walked across the mound of shingle to the house on the beach. He was rather a fresh-faced man, of the Saxon colouring, and at a distance looking good-humoured. That he should have been able to make such an appearance while doing daily battle with his wine, was a proof of great physical vigour. His pace was leisurely, as it must needs be over pebbles, where half a step is subtracted from each whole one in passing; and, besides, he was aware of a general breath at his departure that betokened a censorious assembly. Why should he not market for himself? He threw dignity into his retreating figure in response to the internal interrogation. The moment >was one when conscious rectitude =pliers man should have a tail for its just display. Philosophers have drawn attention to the power of the human face to express pure virtue, but no sooner has it passed on than the spirit erect within would seem helpless. The breadth of our shoulders is apparently presented for our critics to write on. Poor duty is done by the simple sense of moral worth, to supplant that absence of feature in the plain flat back. We are below the animals in this. How charged with language behind him is a dog! Everybody has noticed it. Let a dog turn away from a hostile circle, and his crisp and wary tail not merely defends him, it menaces; it is a weapon. Man has no choice but to surge and boil, or stiffen preposterously. Knowing the popular sentiment about his marketing–for men can see behind their backs, though they may have nothing to speak with–Tinman resembled those persons of principle who decline to pay for a “Bless your honour!” from a voluble beggar-woman, and obtain the reverse of it after they have gone by. He was sufficiently sensitive to feel that his back was chalked as on a slate. The only remark following him was, “There he goes!”

He went to the seaward gate of the house on the beach, made practicable in a low flint wall, where he was met by his sister Martha, to whom he handed the basket. Apparently he named the cost of his purchase per dozen. She touched the fish and pressed the bellies of the topmost, it might be to question them tenderly concerning their roes. Then the couple passed out of sight. Herrings were soon after this despatching their odours through the chimneys of all Crikswich, and there was that much of concord and festive union among the inhabitants.

The house on the beach had been posted where it stood, one supposes, for the sake of the sea-view, from which it turned right about to face the town across a patch of grass and salt scurf, looking like a square and scornful corporal engaged in the perpetual review of an awkward squad of recruits. Sea delighted it not, nor land either. Marine Parade fronting it to the left, shaded sickly eyes, under a worn green verandah, from a sun that rarely appeared, as the traducers of spinsters pretend those virgins are ever keenly on their guard against him that cometh not. Belle Vue Terrace stared out of lank glass panes without reserve, unashamed of its yellow complexion. A gaping public-house, calling itself newly Hotel, fell backward a step. Villas with the titles of royalty and bloody battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in bowwindows beside other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the attention a decent straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference. On an elevated meadow to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba nestled among weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff. Shavenness, featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess scurfiness, formed the outward expression of a town to which people were reasonably glad to come from London in summer-time, for there was nothing in Crikswich to distract the naked pursuit of health. The sea tossed its renovating brine to the determinedly sniffing animal, who went to his meals with an appetite that rendered him cordially eulogistic of the place, in spite of certain frank whiffs of sewerage coming off an open deposit on the common to mingle with the brine. Tradition told of a French lady and gentleman entering the town to take lodgings for a month, and that on the morrow they took a boat from the shore, saying in their faint English to a sailor veteran of the coastguard, whom they had consulted about the weather, “It is better zis zan zat,” as they shrugged between rough sea and corpselike land. And they were not seen again. Their meaning none knew. Having paid their bill at the lodging-house, their conduct was ascribed to systematic madness. English people came to Crikswich for the pure salt sea air, and they did not expect it to be cooked and dressed and decorated for them. If these things are done to nature, it is nature no longer that you have, but something Frenchified. Those French are for trimming Neptune’s beard! Only wait, and you are sure to find variety in nature, more than you may like. You will find it in Neptune. What say you to a breach of the sea-wall, and an inundation of the aromatic grass- flat extending from the house on the beach to the tottering terraces, villas, cottages: and public-house transformed by its ensign to Hotel, along the frontage of the town? Such an event had occurred of old, and had given the house on the beach the serious shaking great Neptune in his wrath alone can give. But many years had intervened. Groynes had been run down to intercept him and divert him. He generally did his winter mischief on a mill and salt marshes lower westward. Mr. Tinman had always been extremely zealous in promoting the expenditure of what moneys the town had to spare upon the protection of the shore, as it were for the propitiation or defiance of the sea-god. There was a kindly joke against him an that subject among brother jurats. He retorted with the joke, that the first thing for Englishmen to look to were England’s defences.

But it will not do to be dwelling too fondly on our eras of peace, for which we make such splendid sacrifices. Peace, saving for the advent of a German band, which troubled the repose of the town at intervals, had imparted to the inhabitants of Crikswich, within and without, the likeness to its most perfect image, together, it must be confessed, with a degree of nervousness that invested common events with some of the terrors of the Last Trump, when one night, just upon the passing of the vernal equinox, something happened.

CHAPTER II

A carriage Stopped short in the ray of candlelight that was fitfully and feebly capering on the windy blackness outside the open workshop of Crickledon, the carpenter, fronting the sea-beach. Mr. Tinnnan’s house was inquired for. Crickledon left off planing; at half-sprawl over the board, he bawled out, “Turn to the right; right ahead; can’t mistake it.” He nodded to one of the cronies intent on watching his labours: “Not unless they mean to be bait for whiting-pout. Who’s that for Tinman, I wonder?” The speculations of Crickledon’s friends were lost in the scream of the plane.

One cast an eye through the door and observed that the carriage was there still. “Gentleman’s got out and walked,” said Crickledon. He was informed that somebody was visible inside. “Gentleman’s wife, mayhap,” he said. His friends indulged in their privilege of thinking what they liked, and there was the usual silence of tongues in the shop. He furnished them sound and motion for their amusement, and now and then a scrap of conversation; and the sedater spirits dwelling in his immediate neighbourhood were accustomed to step in and see him work up to supper- time, instead of resorting to the more turbid and costly excitement of the public-house.

Crickledon looked up from the measurement of a thumb-line. In the doorway stood a bearded gentleman, who announced himself with the startling exclamation, “Here’s a pretty pickle!” and bustled to make way for a man well known to them as Ned Crummins, the upholsterer’s man, on whose back hung an article of furniture, the condition of which, with a condensed brevity of humour worthy of literary admiration, he displayed by mutely turning himself about as he entered.

“Smashed!” was the general outcry.

“I ran slap into him,” said the gentleman. “Who the deuce!–no bones broken, that’s one thing. The fellow–there, look at him: he’s like a glass tortoise.”

“It’s a chiwal glass,” Crickledon remarked, and laid finger on the star in the centre.

“Gentleman ran slap into me,” said Crummins, depositing the frame on the floor of the shop.

“Never had such a shock in my life,” continued the gentleman. “Upon my soul, I took him for a door: I did indeed. A kind of light flashed from one of your houses here, and in the pitch dark I thought I was at the door of old Mart Tinman’s house, and dash me if I did n’t go in–crash! But what the deuce do you do, carrying that great big looking-glass at night, man? And, look here tell me; how was it you happened to be going glass foremost when you’d got the glass on your back?”

“Well, ‘t ain’t my fault, I knows that,” rejoined Crummins. “I came along as careful as a man could. I was just going to bawl out to Master Tinman, ‘I knows the way, never fear me’; for I thinks I hears him call from his house, ‘Do ye see the way?’ and into me this gentleman runs all his might, and smash goes the glass. I was just ten steps from Master Tinman’s gate, and that careful, I reckoned every foot I put down, that I was; I knows I did, though.”

“Why, it was me calling, ‘I’m sure I can’t see the way.’

“You heard me, you donkey!” retorted the bearded gentleman. “What was the good of your turning that glass against me in the very nick when I dashed on you?”

“Well, ‘t ain’t my fault, I swear,” said Crummins. “The wind catches voices so on a pitch dark night, you never can tell whether they be on one shoulder or the other. And if I’m to go and lose my place through no fault of mine—-”

“Have n’t I told you, sir, I’m going to pay the damage? Here,” said the gentleman, fumbling at his waistcoat, “here, take this card. Read it.”

For the first time during the scene in the carpenter’s shop, a certain pomposity swelled the gentleman’s tone. His delivery of the card appeared to act on him like the flourish of a trumpet before great men.

“Van Diemen Smith,” he proclaimed himself for the assistance of Ned Crummins in his task; the latter’s look of sad concern on receiving the card seeming to declare an unscholarly conscience.

An anxious feminine voice was heard close beside Mr. Van Diemen Smith.

“Oh, papa, has there been an accident? Are you hurt?”

“Not a bit, Netty; not a bit. Walked into a big looking-glass in the dark, that’s all. A matter of eight or ten pound, and that won’t stump us. But these are what I call queer doings in Old England, when you can’t take a step in the dark, on the seashore without plunging bang into a glass. And it looks like bad luck to my visit to old Mart Tinman.”

“Can you,” he addressed the company, “tell me of a clean, wholesome lodging-house? I was thinking of flinging myself, body and baggage, on your mayor, or whatever he is–my old schoolmate; but I don’t so much like this beginning. A couple of bed-rooms and sitting-room; clean sheets, well aired; good food, well cooked; payment per week in advance.”

The pebble dropped into deep water speaks of its depth by the tardy arrival of bubbles on the surface, and, in like manner, the very simple question put by Mr. Van Diemen Smith pursued its course of penetration in the assembled mind in the carpenter’s shop for a considerable period, with no sign to show that it had reached the bottom.

“Surely, papa, we can go to an inn? There must be some hotel,” said his daughter.

“There’s good accommodation at the Cliff Hotel hard by,” said Crickledon.

“But,” said one of his friends, “if you don’t want to go so far, sir, there’s Master Crickledon’s own house next door, and his wife lets lodgings, and there’s not a better cook along this coast.”

“Then why did n’t the man mention it? Is he afraid of having me?” asked Mr. Smith, a little thunderingly. “I may n’t be known much yet in England; but I’ll tell you, you inquire the route to Mr. Van Diemen Smith over there in Australia.”

“Yes, papa,” interrupted his daughter, “only you must consider that it may not be convenient to take us in at this hour–so late.”

“It’s not that, miss, begging your pardon,” said Crickledon. “I make a point of never recommending my own house. That’s where it is. Otherwise you’re welcome to try us.”

“I was thinking of falling bounce on my old schoolmate, and putting Old English hospitality to the proof,” Mr. Smith meditated. “But it’s late. Yes, and that confounded glass! No, we’ll bide with you, Mr. Carpenter. I’ll send my card across to Mart Tinman to-morrow, and set him agog at his breakfast.”

Mr. Van Diemen Smith waved his hand for Crickledon to lead the way.

Hereupon Ned Crummins looked up from the card he had been turning over and over, more and more like one arriving at a condemnatory judgment of a fish.

“I can’t go and give my master a card instead of his glass,” he remarked.

“Yes, that reminds me; and I should like to know what you meant by bringing that glass away from Mr. Tinman’s house at night,” said Mr. Smith. “If I’m to pay for it, I’ve a right to know. What’s the meaning of moving it at night? Eh, let’s hear. Night’s not the time for moving big glasses like that. I’m not so sure I haven’t got a case.”

“If you’ll step round to my master along o’ me, sir,” said Crummins, “perhaps he’ll explain.”

Crummins was requested to state who his master was, and he replied, “Phippun and Company;” but Mr. Smith positively refused to go with him.

“But here,” said he, “is a crown for you, for you’re a civil fellow. You’ll know where to find me in the morning; and mind, I shall expect Phippun and Company to give me a very good account of their reason for moving a big looking-glass on a night like this. There, be off.”

The crown-piece in his hand effected a genial change in Crummins’ disposition to communicate. Crickledon spoke to him about the glass; two or three of the others present jogged him. “What did Mr. Tinman want by having the glass moved so late in the day, Ned? Your master wasn’t nervous about his property, was he?”

“Not he,” said Crummins, and began to suck down his upper lip and agitate his eyelids and stand uneasily, glimmering signs of the setting in of the tide of narration.

He caught the eye of Mr. Smith, then looked abashed at Miss.

Crickledon saw his dilemma. “Say what’s uppermost, Ned; never mind how you says it. English is English. Mr. Tinman sent for you to take the glass away, now, did n’t he?”

“He did,” said Crummins.

“And you went to him.”

“Ay, that I did.”

“And he fastened the chiwal glass upon your back”

“He did that.”

“That’s all plain sailing. Had he bought the glass?”

“No, he had n’t bought it. He’d hired it.”

As when upon an enforced visit to the dentist, people have had one tooth out, the remaining offenders are more willingly submitted to the operation, insomuch that a poetical licence might hazard the statement that they shed them like leaves of the tree, so Crummins, who had shrunk from speech, now volunteered whole sentences in succession, and how important they were deemed by his fellow-townsman, Mr. Smith, and especially Miss Annette Smith, could perceive in their ejaculations, before they themselves were drawn into the strong current of interest.

And this was the matter: Tinman had hired the glass for three days. Latish, on the very first day of the hiring, close upon dark, he had despatched imperative orders to Phippun and Company to take the glass out of his house on the spot. And why? Because, as he maintained, there was a fault in the glass causing an incongruous and absurd reflection; and he was at that moment awaiting the arrival of another chiwal-glass.

“Cut along, Ned,” said Crickledon.

“What the deuce does he want with a chiwal-glass at all?” cried Mr. Smith, endangering the flow of the story by suggesting to the narrator that he must “hark back,” which to him was equivalent to the jumping of a chasm hindward. Happily his brain had seized a picture:

“Mr. Tinman, he’s a-standin’ in his best Court suit.”

Mr. Tinmau’s old schoolmate gave a jump; and no wonder.

“Standing?” he cried; and as the act of standing was really not extraordinary, he fixed upon the suit: “Court?”

“So Mrs. Cavely told me, it was what he was standin’ in, and as I found ‘m I left ‘m,” said Crummins.

“He’s standing in it now?” said Mr. Van Diemen Smith, with a great gape.

Crummins doggedly repeated the statement. Many would have ornamented it in the repetition, but he was for bare flat truth.

“He must be precious proud of having a Court suit,” said Mr. Smith, and gazed at his daughter so glassily that she smiled, though she was impatient to proceed to Mrs. Crickledon’s lodgings.

“Oh! there’s where it is?” interjected the carpenter, with a funny frown at a low word from Ned Crummins. “Practicing, is he? Mr. Tinman’s practicing before the glass preparatory to his going to the palace in London.”

“He gave me a shillin’,” said Crummins.

Crickledon comprehended him immediately. “We sha’n’t speak about it, Ned.”

What did you see? was thus cautiously suggested.

The shilling was on Crummins’ tongue to check his betrayal of the secret scene. But remembering that he had only witnessed it by accident, and that Mr. Tinman had not completely taken him into his confidence, he thrust his hand down his pocket to finger the crown-piece lying in fellowship with the coin it multiplied five times, and was inspired to think himself at liberty to say: “All I saw was when the door opened. Not the house-door. It was the parlour-door. I saw him walk up to the glass, and walk back from the glass. And when he’d got up to the glass he bowed, he did, and he went back’ards just so.”

Doubtless the presence of a lady was the active agent that prevented Crummins from doubling his body entirely, and giving more than a rapid indication of the posture of Mr. Tinman in his retreat before the glass. But it was a glimpse of broad burlesque, and though it was received with becoming sobriety by the men in the carpenter’s shop, Annette plucked at her father’s arm.

She could not get him to depart. That picture of his old schoolmate Martin Tinman practicing before a chiwal glass to present himself at the palace in his Court suit, seemed to stupefy his Australian intelligence.

“What right has he got to go to Court?” Mr. Van Diemen Smith inquired, like the foreigner he had become through exile.

“Mr. Tinman’s bailiff of the town,” said Crickledon.

“And what was his objection to that glass I smashed?”

“He’s rather an irritable gentleman,” Crickledon murmured, and turned to Crummins.

Crummins growled: “He said it was misty, and gave him a twist.”

“What a big fool he must be! eh?” Mr. Smith glanced at Crickledon and the other faces for the verdict of Tinman’s townsmen upon his character.

They had grounds for thinking differently of Tinman.

“He’s no fool,” said Crickledon.

Another shook his head. “Sharp at a bargain.”

“That he be,” said the chorus.

Mr. Smith was informed that Mr. Tinman would probably end by buying up half the town.

“Then,” said Mr. Smith, “he can afford to pay half the money for that glass, and pay he shall.”

A serious view of the recent catastrophe was presented by his declaration.

In the midst of a colloquy regarding the cost of the glass, during which it began to be seen by Mr. Tinman’s townsmen that there was laughing- stuff for a year or so in the scene witnessed by Crummins, if they postponed a bit their right to the laugh and took it in doses, Annette induced her father to signal to Crickledon his readiness to go and see the lodgings. No sooner had he done it than he said, “What on earth made us wait all this time here? I’m hungry, my dear; I want supper.”

“That is because you have had a disappointment. I know you, papa,” said Annette.

“Yes, it’s rather a damper about old Mart Tinman,” her father assented. “Or else I have n’t recovered the shock of smashing that glass, and visit it on him. But, upon my honour, he’s my only friend in England, I have n’t a single relative that I know of, and to come and find your only friend making a donkey of himself, is enough to make a man think of eating and drinking.”

Annette murmured reproachfully: “We can hardly say he is our only friend in England, papa, can we?”

“Do you mean that young fellow? You’ll take my appetite away if you talk of him. He’s a stranger. I don’t believe he’s worth a penny. He owns he’s what he calls a journalist.”

These latter remarks were hurriedly exchanged at the threshold of Crickledon’s house.

“It don’t look promising,” said Mr. Smith.

“I didn’t recommend it,” said Crickledon.

“Why the deuce do you let your lodgings, then?”

“People who have come once come again.”

“Oh! I am in England,” Annette sighed joyfully, feeling at home in some trait she had detected in Crickledon.

CHAPTER III

The story of the shattered chiwal-glass and the visit of Tinman’s old schoolmate fresh from Australia, was at many a breakfast-table before. Tinman heard a word of it, and when he did he had no time to spare for such incidents, for he was reading to his widowed sister Martha, in an impressive tone, at a tolerably high pitch of the voice, and with a suppressed excitement that shook away all things external from his mind as violently as it agitated his body. Not the waves without but the engine within it is which gives the shock and tremor to the crazy steamer, forcing it to cut through the waves and scatter them to spray; and so did Martin Tinman make light of the external attack of the card of VAN DIEMEN SMITH, and its pencilled line: “An old chum of yours, eh, matey? “Even the communication of Phippun & Co. concerning the chiwal- glass, failed to divert him from his particular task. It was indeed a public duty; and the chiwal-glass, though pertaining to it, was a private business. He that has broken the glass, let that man pay for it, he pronounced–no doubt in simpler fashion, being at his ease in his home, but with the serenity of one uplifted. As to the name VAN DIEMEN SMITH, he knew it not, and so he said to himself while accurately recollecting the identity of the old chum who alone of men would have thought of writing eh, matey?

Mr. Van Diemen Smith did not present the card in person. “At Crickledon’s,” he wrote, apparently expecting the bailiff of the town to rush over to him before knowing who he was.

Tinman was far too busy. Anybody can read plain penmanship or print, but ask anybody not a Cabinet Minister or a Lord-in-Waiting to read out loud and clear in a Palace, before a Throne. Oh! the nature of reading is distorted in a trice, and as Tinman said to his worthy sister: “I can do it, but I must lose no time in preparing myself.” Again, at a reperusal, he informed her: “I must habituate myself.” For this purpose he had put on the suit overnight.

The articulation of faultless English was his object. His sister Martha sat vice-regally to receive his loyal congratulations on the illustrious marriage, and she was pensive, less nervous than her brother from not having to speak continuously, yet somewhat perturbed. She also had her task, and it was to avoid thinking herself the Person addressed by her suppliant brother, while at the same time she took possession of the scholarly training and perfect knowledge of diction and rules of pronunciation which would infallibly be brought to bear on him in the terrible hour of the delivery of the Address. It was no small task moreover to be compelled to listen right through to the end of the Address, before the very gentlest word of criticism was allowed. She did not exactly complain of the renewal of the rehearsal: a fatigue can be endured when it is a joy. What vexed her was her failing memory for the points of objection, as in her imagined High Seat she conceived them; for, in painful truth, the instant her brother had finished she entirely lost her acuteness of ear, and with that her recollection: so there was nothing to do but to say: “Excellent! Quite unobjectionable, dear Martin, quite:” so she said, and emphatically; but the addition of the word “only” was printed on her contracted brow, and every faculty of Tinman’s mind and nature being at strain just then, he asked her testily: “What now? what’s the fault now?” She assured him with languor that there was not a fault. “It’s not your way of talking,” said he, and what he said was true. His discernment was extraordinary; generally he noticed nothing.

Not only were his perceptions quickened by the preparations for the day of great splendour: day of a great furnace to be passed through likewise! –he, was learning English at an astonishing rate into the bargain. A pronouncing Dictionary lay open on his table. To this he flew at a hint of a contrary method, and disputes, verifications and triumphs on one side and the other ensued between brother and sister. In his heart the agitated man believed his sister to be a misleading guide. He dared not say it, he thought it, and previous to his African travel through the Dictionary he had thought his sister infallible on these points. He dared not say it, because he knew no one else before whom he could practice, and as it was confidence that he chiefly wanted–above all things, confidence and confidence comes of practice, he preferred the going on with his practice to an absolute certainty as to correctness.

At midday came another card from Mr. Van Diemen Smith bearing the superscription: alias Phil R.

“Can it be possible,” Tinman asked his sister, “that Philip Ribstone has had the audacity to return to this country? I think,” he added, “I am right in treating whoever sends me this card as a counterfeit.”

Martha’s advice was, that he should take no notice of the card.

“I am seriously engaged,” said Tinman. With a “Now then, dear,” he resumed his labours.

Messages had passed between Tinman and Phippun; and in the afternoon Phippun appeared to broach the question of payment for the chiwal-glass. He had seen Mr. Van Diemen Smith, had found him very strange, rather impracticable. He was obliged to tell Tinman that he must hold him responsible for the glass; nor could he send a second until payment was made for the first. It really seemed as if Tinman would be compelled, by the force of circumstances, to go and shake his old friend by the hand. Otherwise one could clearly see the man might be off: he might be off at any minute, leaving a legal contention behind him. On the other hand, supposing he had come to Crikswich for assistance in money? Friendship is a good thing, and so is hospitality, which is an essentially English thing, and consequently one that it behoves an Englishman to think it his duty to perform, but we do not extend it to paupers. But should a pauper get so close to us as to lay hold of us, vowing he was once our friend, how shake him loose? Tinman foresaw that it might be a matter of five pounds thrown to the dogs, perhaps ten, counting the glass. He put on his hat, full of melancholy presentiments; and it was exactly half-past five o’clock of the spring afternoon when he knocked at Crickledon’s door.

Had he looked into Crickledon’s shop as he went by, he would have perceived Van Diemen Smith astride a piece of timber, smoking a pipe. Van Diemen saw Tinman. His eyes cocked and watered. It is a disgraceful fact to record of him without periphrasis. In truth, the bearded fellow was almost a woman at heart, and had come from the Antipodes throbbing to slap Martin Tinman on the back, squeeze his hand, run over England with him, treat him, and talk of old times in the presence of a trotting regiment of champagne. That affair of the chiwal-glass had temporarily damped his enthusiasm. The absence of a reply to his double transmission of cards had wounded him; and something in the look of Tinman disgusted his rough taste. But the well-known features recalled the days of youth. Tinman was his one living link to the country he admired as the conqueror of the world, and imaginatively delighted in as the seat of pleasures, and he could not discard the feeling of some love for Tinman without losing his grasp of the reason why, he had longed so fervently and travelled so breathlessly to return hither. In the days of their youth, Van Diemen had been Tinman’s cordial spirit, at whom he sipped for cheerful visions of life, and a good honest glow of emotion now and then. Whether it was odd or not that the sipper should be oblivious, and the cordial spirit heartily reminiscent of those times, we will not stay to inquire.

Their meeting took place in Crickledon’s shop. Tinman was led in by Mrs. Crickledon. His voice made a sound of metal in his throat, and his air was that of a man buttoned up to the palate, as he read from the card, glancing over his eyelids, “Mr. Van Diemen Smith, I believe.”

“Phil Ribstone, if you like,” said the other, without rising.

“Oh, ah, indeed!” Tinman temperately coughed.

“Yes, dear me. So it is. It strikes you as odd?”

“The change of name,” said Tinman.

“Not nature, though!”

“Ah! Have you been long in England?”

“Time to run to Helmstone, and on here. You’ve been lucky in business, I hear.”

“Thank you; as things go. Do you think of remaining in England?”

“I’ve got to settle about a glass I broke last night.”

“Ah! I have heard of it. Yes, I fear there will have to be a settlement.”

“I shall pay half of the damage. You’ll have to stump up your part.”

Van Diemen smiled roguishly.

“We must discuss that,” said Tinman, smiling too, as a patient in bed may smile at a doctor’s joke; for he was, as Crickledon had said of him, no fool on practical points, and Van Diemen’s mention of the half-payment reassured him as to his old friend’s position in the world, and softly thawed him. “Will you dine with me to-day?”

“I don’t mind if I do. I’ve a girl. You remember little Netty? She’s walking out on the beach with a young fellow named Fellingham, whose acquaintance we made on the voyage, and has n’t left us long to ourselves. Will you have her as well? And I suppose you must ask him. He’s a newspaper man; been round the world; seen a lot.”

Tinman hesitated. An electrical idea of putting sherry at fifteen shillings per dozen on his table instead of the ceremonial wine at twenty-five shillings, assisted him to say hospitably, “Oh! ah! yes; any friend of yours.”

“And now perhaps you’ll shake my fist,” said Van Diemen.

“With pleasure,” said Tinman. “It was your change of name, you know, Philip.”

Look here, Martin. Van Diemen Smith was a convict, and my benefactor. Why the deuce he was so fond of that name, I can’t tell you; but his dying wish was for me to take it and carry it on. He left me his fortune, for Van Diemen Smith to enjoy life, as he never did, poor fellow, when he was alive. The money was got honestly, by hard labour at a store. He did evil once, and repented after. But, by Heaven!”–Van Diemen jumped up and thundered out of a broad chest–“the man was one of the finest hearts that ever beat. He was! and I’m proud of him. When he died, I turned my thoughts home to Old England and you, Martin.”

“Oh!” said Tinman; and reminded by Van Diemen’s way of speaking, that