*CHAPTER XLIX.*
*TETE-A-TETE.*
Philip passed a night of pain and fever. He was bruised and shaken.
His hands had been scarified in the slide down the rubble, and when
circulation returned in them they bled. The exposure to cold had
affected him, and he ached in every joint; his skin was as though
red-hot plates had been passed over it. He could not sleep, for if he
dropped out of consciousness it was into mental fear that he was falling
down a precipice into the vortex of an unseen torrent, and he woke with
a start that sent a thrill of torture through his strained nerves. He
could not get the roar of the water out of his ears; he had carried it
away with him in his head. Salome, at his request, to dispel it played
the jingling piano in the _salle_ underneath his room, but that was
powerless to dissipate it. Then he sent his request to Miss Durham to
sing. Perhaps her splendid voice might drive away the delusion. Her
answer was that she had no voice. No voice! He knew that she had; she
had boasted to him of it. He sent another message. Then came back the
reply that she could not, and would not, sing to such a detestable
little instrument as that in the _salle_.
Next day Philip was obliged to keep his bed. He was in discomfort and
pain, and not the best of tempers.
'Salome,' said he, when his wife came to him with her fresh bright face
full of sympathy and cheering? 'thank you for going on playing on the
piano yesterday evening. Whilst you played I could forget the roar, but
it returned directly that your fingers left the keys. I take it most
unkind of Miss Durham that she would not sing.'
'Oh, Philip! don't you know that she has come to the high mountains to
husband her voice, and it is possible that to sing at this great
altitude--we are nearly seven thousand feet above the sea--might do it
serious injury.'
'Why did she laugh when I was drawn out of the chasm?'
'Philip, dear, I cannot tell; but neither she nor I had any idea of the
danger you had been in. The ravine was completely blocked up and
sheeted over with snow, and we did not know anything of the horrible
chasm down which the river plunged and through which it struggled. We
only knew that you had gone through a crust of snow, and that you had to
be drawn out.'
'But did you not hear the thunder of the torrent?'
'We did not particularly notice it--the roof of snow muffled it. You
who were beneath heard it, but we--we may have heard something, but had
no more idea of what there was beneath than you can have had when you
slipped through.'
'It was very unfeeling of her to laugh.'
'Look here, Philip,' said Salome. 'In turning the sleeves of your coat
inside out I have found these flowers--edelweiss, and fresh.'
'Yes, I found them.'
He considered for a moment, and then said: 'They are for you. Wear
them, and let our party know that I did not encounter the risks I passed
through without bringing back with me a prize.'
'Thank you, dear Philip;' she stooped over him and kissed his lips.
'Dear, dear Philip, I shall never part with them. It was most kind of
you, and brave, too, to go in search of them for me.'
'Salome,' said he, 'don't let Lambert, and above all Mrs. Sidebottom,
come and worry me to-day. I am in horrible pain, I cannot move, and I
cannot bear to be bothered. You go down and take a little stroll; do
not mind about me. I will try to doze. I had no sleep last night. I
am turning all the colours of the rainbow, I was so bruised. I shall be
right in a day or two. No bones are broken, but I cannot stir, and
cannot endure to be worried; let me be quiet and a good deal to myself.
I will sleep when I can.'
'May I sit by you a little?' she asked timidly. 'I will not speak--only
hold your hand.'
She look his silence for consent. And he found comfort in her presence;
a soothing feeling crept up his arm from her hands that clasped his, and
spread over his heart.
He was somewhat ashamed of himself. He had not made his expedition
among the rocks, and met with his fall in searching for edelweiss for
her, but for Artemisia. Salome had accepted the flower, and cherished
it as if he had sought it for her, and he allowed her to remain in this
delusion. Was this honourable? Was it in accordance with that strict
rectitude on which he plumed himself? Yet he could not tell her the
truth; it would wound her too deeply, and--humble himself too
considerably.
Two days ago Artemisia Durham had taken his hand on the Ober-Alp, beside
the lake, when he extended it to her in pledge that he would do great
things for her; and now, in redemption of his pledge, he had tried to
get her a bit of edelweiss, and had tumbled through the snow in his
efforts. And what could he do for her? She had not asked for legal
advice or for figured table-linen, the two things he could furnish her
with without offence. It was as well that his hand was hurt--it served
him right; he had no right to offer what he was unable to perform. How
differently he had felt as Artemisia held his hand! Then an
intoxicating current had set boiling through his veins, turning his
head, maddening him. Now the cool hand of Salome conveyed balm to his
aching joints, and what was a better medicine, though a bitter one,
self-reproach to his conscience.
Now, also, for the first time since his walk with Miss Durham, some of
his old suspicion oozed up through the joints of his thoughts. What was
the reason of her laughter? Thrice it had occurred; first she had said
something laughingly about him to Beaple Yeo at table, and provoked that
odious creature to an explosion of laughter. Then, on the Ober-Alp Pass
she had laughed for no particular reason that Philip could see, and had
made Philip laugh with her. And, lastly, she had laughed mockingly,
alone, when he was rescued from the very verge of a dreadful death.
He shut his eyes and lay still. Salome sat by him for an hour, and
then, thinking he was asleep, released his hand, kissed him quietly, and
stole from the room. Mrs. Sidebottom wanted to take a short walk; it was
tedious in the inn, with only a few old and odd volumes of Tauchnitz
novels about; and cold or inactivity was rendering the Labarte girls
torpid, and they were clinging about Aunt Janet, or dropping upon her,
at embarrassing times. Mrs. Sidebottom did not feel equal to managing
all three unaided, and as Miss Durham declined to accompany her, she
insisted on Salome lending her aid. Salome consented. Her husband had
wished that she should go out, and he was asleep and could be left
without anxiety. The girls had been shown at Andermatt beads and seals
made of a sparkling stone, which was said to be found on the St. Gothard
road, half-way down the Val Tremola, and when Mrs. Sidebottom proposed a
walk they entreated to be allowed to search for this precious stone, of
which they resolved to compose necklaces for themselves, or at least
bracelets. It would create quite a sensation at Elboeuf; not one of the
girls there had seen this beautiful stone--not one probably had heard
the name of Tremoline, by which it was called.
There was another reason why Mrs. Sidebottom, on this occasion,
particularly desired the companionship of Salome. She was commissioned
to break to her the news that Janet and Lambert were engaged, and to use
her endeavours to overcome any prejudice Salome might entertain against
the marriage being solemnized shortly, at Berne, at the Embassy. And
Mrs. Sidebottom was about to attack her on this point by representing
that she, Salome, was not the person to make objections when she herself
had married Philip within a very short time of the supposed death of
Uncle Jeremiah, who, though he was not her father, had stood to her much
in the light of a parent.
Salome had observed that Janet and the captain took much delight in each
other's society, but she had not given their association a serious
thought; she knew that her sister liked lively society, and the captain
had exhibited, whilst at Andermatt, an amount of vivacity and humour
which she had not given him the credit of possessing. They were both
interested in things of which she knew nothing, and naturally,
therefore, sought each other's society. They were also connections in a
roundabout fashion. Through Philip, Lambert became her cousin, and as
Janet was her sister, he must be some sort of cousin to Janet. Quite
near enough relation to remove starchness of intercourse, and place them
on easy terms of cousinly association, that excused a good deal which
would be inadmissible were they unrelated.
Philip heard the voices of the party outside the house, the crisp
laughter of the girls, and the sawing tones of Mrs. Sidebottom, and then
the sounds became distant, and ceased. His meditations were interrupted
about a quarter of an hour later by three raps against the wall by his
head. The several rooms in the inn were small, and divided from each
other and from the passage by wood--not very thick deal boarding,
papered over, but which in places had warped and split the paper.
Signora Lombardi, every spring, with a pot of paste and some strips of
paper, went about the rooms pasting over the rifts, disguising them, and
preventing the partitions from being as diaphanous as they were
diaphonous. German, Swiss and Italian beds are wooden boxes, narrow and
short; and in such a bed against such a wall lay Philip, unable to move
without torture.
Again three loud raps.
'Who is that?' he called.
'You are awake, Mr. Pennycomequick?' asked the voice of Miss Durham,
almost in his ear. 'We are in adjoining stalls. I want a word with
you, because I leave this insufferable place to-morrow, I can endure the
cold and tedium no longer; and before you return to the nether world, I
may be away unless you descend in a _glissade_, and shoot through the
roof of the Hotel Imperial upon us into the midst of the table at
dinner.'
Philip felt the partition between them shake. She was laughing. She
had her chair against it, and leaned against it--to speak to him and to
laugh at him.
'I must ask your pardon,' she said presently with a twitter in her tones
from suppressed merriment; 'I did not realize your danger, or rather the
danger you had escaped, when pulled out of the snow. But my laughter
was excusable; you can have no conception how infinitely comic an object
you presented; and the whole affair was so ridiculous. You--going aloft
after edelweiss without the smallest acquaintance with its habitat, and
with no experience to teach you how to keep your footing in Alpine
altitudes, and shooting down, pop! through a hole into the nether world.
And then--to see the men about the hole extracting you--it was like
Esquimaux fishing.'
Philip was not only vastly offended, but he was also greatly shocked, at
the conduct of the young Chicago lady, holding a conversation with him
through the wall when he was in bed. To show his sense of the
indelicacy of her course, he said nothing in return.
She tapped again.
'Well, Mr. Pennycomequick! have I scandalized you? We are in the land
of freedom; and I am a daughter of the Stars and Stripes, and we
American girls are not so particular about trifles as are your English
misses. Are you very much bruised and crumpled?'
'Very,' groaned Philip.
'Do you good; take some of the starch out of you. You had the temerity
to browbeat and insult me, when first you came to Andermatt. Now I have
served you out, and I may tell you this to your consolation, that it is
a lucky thing for you that you had your fall and contusions. But for
that I would have turned you inside out, and twisted your silly head off
your shoulders. I intended to do it, for no man offends me and escapes
stings. I am content to leave you as you are, black and blue, and
disjointed, like a wretch on the rack.'
She was stretching his mind on the rack and disjointing that as well,
sitting, leaning against the wall, and working the mechanism.
'Mr. Pennycomequick, I heard about you from your wife before you
arrived; how different you proved to the idea I had formed, you have too
much conceit to imagine. I found a wooden man, with his limbs affixed
to his trunk by pegs, with a wooden face, wooden ideas, wooden
manners--and when this wooden figure-head had the audacity to insult
me----'
Philip exclaimed, 'What I said was true. You yourself admitted its
truth, when you told me your story.'
'My dear dolt!' said Miss Durham, 'I admit it. But who likes to have the
truth skewered on a bayonet, and rammed down his throat? And now--what
I say would splutter about like Japanese fireworks and do no one any
harm, were it not that it is true, true in every word, and this it is
that turns each word into duck-shot, with which I pepper you--through
the wall.'
It was a wonder that next day Signora Lombardi did not find the sheets
of No. 18 singed, so hot did Philip become between them with offended
modesty, with anger, anguish, and shame.
'The game is up, so I do not mind showing you my hand,' cried Artemisia.
She had folded her arms over her breast, and leaned back, with her head
against the wall, and talked hastily, passionately. 'That little wife of
yours, who is a thousand times too good for you, and whom I pity, yoked
to such a fellow as yourself, she told me that it was not possible for
you to come to love me, because she was your wife. Not, she hastened to
explain, that she esteemed herself irresistible, and very superior, but
because she had such a towering opinion of your rectitude, equal to your
own of yourself. That was as much as daring me to attempt the conquest;
and your own absurd self-esteem was another provocation. When you threw
down the glove I accepted the challenge, and you know how in an hour or
two I had spun you round like a teetotum.'
She stayed talking to laugh. As she laughed she shook the wall, and the
wall rattled Philip's bed, and the rattling bed rattled his aching
joints; but he felt these pains no more in the intensity of the agony of
shame that he endured in his racked mind.
'You were quite fetching!' she continued. 'When you held out your hand
and offered to be my stay, I was obliged to jump up. With all my powers
of self-control I could hardly keep from boxing your ears and sending
you into the lake for your impudence. However, I had no wish that the
transformation scene should come off too soon. I intended to lead you
on through other follies till I had ruined your reputation and your
self-respect. But the fates have been against me; I cannot wait longer
here. I abandon you to yourself and to your good little wife. I cannot
waste time over you. I have other matters to attend to; better game to
pursue than such a wooden leaping frog as you.' She stood up from her
chair, and went to the window; it commanded a bleak prospect. She could
not see the returning party on it. The girls Labarte had perhaps found
the desired minerals and would not desist from collecting till they had
each enough to form a _parure_ of Tremoline.
Artemisia returned to her seat against the wall, and said, 'As for that
romance I told you about myself, believe of it as much or as little as
you please. When you tell your own story, with your autobiography, the
little episode of Artemisia Durham will not be found in it. We only
remember and write of ourselves as we would like others to know us, not
as we are. Is it not so?'
Then suddenly she broke into a song, a popular Viennese opera air, which
she had turned into rough English verse to enable her to sing it at
concerts elsewhere than in Germany. She had a beautiful, a naturally
flexible voice, and every note was like an articulate crystal drop.
'A little grain of falsehood
Is found in all that's said,
It penetrates as leaven
Whatever's uttered.
No man is what he seemeth.
No woman what appears.
There's falsehood oft in laughter,
And falsehood e'en in tears.
Both fact and fib together go
In everything we say or do.
To a peck of truth--a pinch of lie,
As the spice in the pudding, to qualify.'
*CHAPTER L.*
*IN THE HOSPICE.*
There is a toy, the delight of children, that consists in a manikin with
his legs curled under him, weighted with lead in his globular nether
parts. This manikin, however, persistently held down, or violently
knocked over, always rights himself.
And there are human beings similarly constituted. With them self-conceit
supplies the place of lead. There is no disturbing their equilibrium for
more than a moment. Lay their heads in the dust, and the instant the
finger that depressed them is removed, up go the heads again, nose in
air. Strike them with horsewhip or poker, and they shiver in mute
anger, unconscious of humiliation, and they are steady again, nose in
air. Bore holes in them, and you cannot let out their ponderosity and
disturb their equilibrium; set them on the fire, and you cannot melt the
self-conceit out of them. It oozes out of their pores, it distils from
their finger-tips, it streams out of their eyes, it pours from their
lips, and yet never exhausts itself, any more than the oil in the cruse
of the widow of Sarepta. Kick them, and they travel upright, nose in
air, along the carpet; pitch them out of the window, and they go down
head uppermost; sink them in the deepest well, and they sit, slowly
disintegrating at the bottom, head up.
Philip was not one of these. It was true that in him was a large amount
of self-esteem--or what religious people would call self-righteousness,
but it was not an organic inbred quality; it had been developed by his
education, by the circumstances of his early life, and could therefore
be expelled from his system by sharp medicine. By one of those
exquisitely pitiful provisions of Nature, which compensates to the
nightingale for his plainness by giving him a tuneful voice, and to the
peacock for his harsh notes by surrounding him with a glory of gold and
green, men of little acquirements, little minds, little presence, are
furnished with the blessed gift of bumptiousness, which makes them
unconscious of their insignificance, which induces those who can by no
probability be heroes to others to be heroes to themselves. Just as the
most ignorant men are the most positive, so are the most empty men the
most self-contained. They can blow themselves out with the breath of
their own nostrils.
Success in life is not necessary to make a man conceited, nor beauty to
superinduce vanity in a woman. The extravagances of conceit are found in
those men who have made a botch of life, and of vanity in those women
who have least personal charms. Every disappointment, every rebuff,
throws them in on themselves, and they seek in themselves that approval
and appreciation which is denied them without. Like Narcissus, but
lacking his excuse, they fall in love with themselves, because no one
else will love them. Is it not possible that appreciation may be an
element as necessary to the psychical as oxygen is necessary to the
physical life, that when it is not freely given or wrested from the
world without, we may set to work to engender it for ourselves within,
just as in Jules Verne's romance those who voyaged ten thousand leagues
under the sea, being out of the element that naturally fed the lungs,
manufactured it for themselves under water?
Had Philip been constitutionally conceited, had bumptiousness been
congenital, like scrofula in the blood, or tubercle in the brain, the
overthrow he had met with at the hands of Miss Durham would not have
seriously affected him, would have had no educative effect on him. He
would have sighed and resigned himself to the conviction that Miss
Durham was to be pitied, not he, because an inscrutable Providence,
which denies to some eyes the faculty of seeing colour, and to some ears
the power to distinguish and enjoy melodies, and to some noses the
capacity to delight in odours, had denied to Miss Durham the ability to
admire and adore him.
In the classic tale, Achilles was plunged by his mother Thetis in the
waters of Styx, which made him invulnerable, save in the heel by which
she held him. So our good mother, Nature, takes some of her children,
not the robust of brain and the Achillean in vigour and beauty, and
renders them callous, so that they can pass through life unhurt by shaft
of ridicule, scourge of rebuke, and flout of fortune. Every arrow
glances off their skin, every blade used on them has its edge turned,
every cudgel breaks without bruising. What happiness is theirs! They
are whole and unhurt, whereas their richer endowed brothers are hacked,
and pierced, and heart-broken.
The author had once to do with a worthy, pious man, put in a situation
under him, who was triple-panoplied in the hide of self-esteem. As is
usual with such persons, he was not much short of a fool, and did very
foolish, inconsiderate things. When called to task for some egregious
act, he bore the reprimand with meekness, then retired to his closet,
where he prayed for him who had rebuked him, as for a persecutor. Never
for one particle of a moment did it occur to him that he himself
deserved blame. And the author knows full well that the callous-skinned
who read these pages will feel no cut from his words, but draw up their
heels under them, out of the way of his scythe.
It has been proved by experiment that the tortoise can live though
deprived of its brains, but the tortoise is the animal with the hardest
epidermis known. Perhaps the converse may be true, that those animals
with the largest proportion of brain may have the most sensitive skins.
Now Philip was no fool. He had plenty of sound sense, but his moral
faculties had been warped by the circumstances of his early career, and
he had grown up with great suspicion of others, but sure confidence in
himself. Now, suddenly, his eyes had been opened by a rude shock; his
moral nature had been subjected to a _glissade_ and a jolt almost as
severe as that which his body had undergone, and as he was not tough and
horny-hided in mind, he felt the results as acutely. If he ached with
bruises and sprains in flesh and sinew, so did he ache with bruise and
sprain in all the tissues and fibres of his inner spiritual self.
When Salome returned to Philip's room she found him disinclined to talk;
he was still twitching and quivering from the lashes he had received,
conscious only of his present pain, covered with humiliation. He had not
been given time to think of his future conduct, even to consider the
retrospect; the present torture occupied and made to tingle every nerve
of his soul.
With the innate tact which Salome possessed, she saw at once that he did
not wish to be disturbed; though she could not divine that he had other
cause for suffering than his fall, or that other injuries had been done
him than those which made his body black and blue. She knew that he was
in pain, and that he sought to disguise the fact from her, and though
full of solicitude for him, she did not harass him with attentions.
She drew a little stool beside his bed, and seated herself on it, with
needlework for the baby, and did not look at him.
He lay on his back, but turned his head, and saw her beautiful auburn
hair, with the evening sun tinging it with orange fire. For some time
he looked at it without thought of her, only of himself, his shame, his
jarred self-respect. That jest of Artemisia about the Esquimaux
watching about a hole in the ice, to pull out of it a fish, was present
to him; he saw the fish come up flapping its tail and tossing to escape
the barb; and then thought of himself being hauled out of the hole in
the snow through which he had plunged. Then he considered how that
she--this malicious woman--had held him with a hook in his jaws and had
played with him, and then how he had been suddenly plunged out of a
world of light and smoothness into an abyss where all was darkness and
horror. Where was he? Into what had he fallen? Had he not almost shot
over the precipice, and gone down into the uttermost depths of
degradation? What if this accident had not befallen him? What if that
woman had gone on playing with him, and had lured him further, as in the
folk-tales the nixies of the waterfalls lure shepherds to throw
themselves over, with the vain belief that by so doing they will fall
into the arms and be received into the realm of the water sprites?
His ideas became confused. At one moment he was a fish caught by a
barb, then he was clinging to a rock, withdrawing from the enticements
of a siren. The sun had set, or no longer crowned Salome with fire, she
continued her needlework till dusk closed in rapidly and prevented her
seeing her stitches. But she sat on, upon her little stool, resting her
cheek against the bedclothes. Philip, half dreaming, had caught a lock
of her hair and twisted it round his finger, and held it as if it were
something that was so firm, so sure that if he clung to it, if he would
retain it about his finger as a golden hoop, he could not continue his
slide and fall, and so thinking, or fancying, in a confused condition of
mind, bred of, or fostered by pain and shame, he had fallen asleep.
Salome sat on, did not venture to move her head lest she should disturb
his sleep by withdrawing her hair from his fingers.
Next morning Mrs. Sidebottom, Miss Durham, Mrs. Baynes, and the Labarte
girls, together with the captain, departed for Andermatt, leaving Salome
with her husband in the hospice. They did not leave without an
altercation and a controversy between Mrs. Sidebottom and the hostess
relative to the bill, in which both engaged with unmatched weapons, as
Mrs. Sidebottom could speak no Italian, and Signora Lombardi no English.
The former could not be brought to admit that the hostess was justified
in charging somewhat higher for provisions, six thousand eight hundred
feet above the sea, than in the valleys where wine is produced and
calves are reared. Mrs. Sidebottom effected no greater reduction than a
franc and a half, which she insisted on having expunged, as a charge for
a meal she protested she had not eaten. She then attempted to shift a
couple of bottles of sparkling Asti from her account to that of Miss
Durham, and to transfer sundry eggs for breakfast to the bill of Mrs.
Baynes, who she was sure had ordered them, though she admitted having
eaten them on the urgency of Janet. Eggs six thousand eight hundred
feet above the sea are--well, eggs. Fowls at that elevation are
sluggish layers, and eggs if brought up from the valleys run risks of
being broken on the road. Mrs. Sidebottom, who resisted paying a penny
a-piece for them when charged to her, saw that there was reason for
setting that value on them when they were in Mrs. Baynes's account. She
fought desperately over the fish. There were lakes hard-by the hospice
doors, and fish in lakes, easily procurable, therefore it was
unreasonable that they should be charged fancy prices.
Mrs. Sidebottom achieved a great success in negotiating a bargain with a
driver from Andermatt, whereby she and the captain were taken back by a
returned carriage that had discharged its load at the hospice; she
succeeded in securing the conveyance for half the ordinary price.
Though she engaged the carriage for herself and her son, the captain did
not return in it, but the three demoiselles Labarte. Janet and the
captain, who had become inseparable, and who reacted on each other, he
reviving her health, and she evoking life and wit out of his torpid
nature, returned in a smaller trap behind the carriage of Mrs.
Sidebottom. Miss Durham had made her own arrangements, and went off in a
cabriolet by herself. She took an almost affectionate farewell of
Salome, whom she really liked, though she despised her. Miss Durham was
sure she had done Salome a good turn in the way in which she had brought
Philip to his senses, and she accordingly patronized and petted his
simple wife. She was pleased with herself for having contributed to the
happiness of the young wife by making a fool of her husband, and then
telling him what a fool he had been made.
Salome in her guilelessness reproached herself for having for a little
while felt a suspicion of her husband and her friend, for having given
way to a feeling of jealousy, for having been unhappy because Philip was
so good and obliging as to make an effort to do what she had herself
urged him to--make friends with the lonely American girl.
And Philip? In him self-reproach grew. It could grow now, for the soil
was ready for it. Hitherto it was choked with the roots of pride and
self-esteem. These had been torn up, and he was able now to appreciate
himself justly and realize the preciousness of Salome.
Formerly he had looked upon himself as having done a grand and gracious
act in taking her to him. An injustice had been committed--how he did
not know--in some mysterious way, and he had stooped in the integrity of
his soul to take up Salome, make her his wife, so as to indemnify her
for her loss.
The suspicion he had entertained against his aunt relative to the will
before the return of his uncle had been deepened since he had talked the
matter over with Jeremiah. He had now very little doubt that Mrs.
Sidebottom had succeeded in getting at the document unguardedly kept by
Salome, and tearing away the signature. But though he was tolerably
convinced that this fraudulent act had been committed by her, he had not
till now considered that by this act his family was dishonoured, as was
hers by the existence of Schofield. In what were the Pennycomequicks so
much more virtuous than the Schofields? Earle Schofield, her father,
was a swindler, and Louisa Sidebottom had committed an act that was
felony.
And what was he, himself? He had wounded, driven from him with reproach
and harshness the most innocent, single-hearted of women, who was
faithful to him and to her duties in every fibre of mind, and body, and
soul; whereas he, in a few hours, subjected to a slight temptation, had
swerved from the path of right, had yielded to the fascination of the
temptress, which he had not the moral strength to resist, and had been
carried by her almost to the verge of committing a serious wrong.
The unworthiness of Schofield could be cancelled by the unworthiness of
Mrs. Sidebottom. There was not much choice between them. But what was
there to set in the account to balance his deviation in heart from his
duty to Salome, the injustice and cruelty with which he had treated her
at Mergatroyd?
Philip saw all this now clearly, and felt keen mortification and
repentance. Salome was constantly with him; and he now, from his bed,
and when he rose and walked leaning on her, had his eyes opened to see
her many merits, to love the perfect purity and integrity of her soul.
She was a child in heart, with the mind of a woman. She was not very
clever, but she had common-sense. She was well but not highly educated,
she had seen very little of the world, and this had necessarily given a
narrow sweep to her powers; but her faculties were good, and with a
widened range, her mind would rise to take an interest in all that was
presented to her view. Hitherto he had liked Salome, appreciated her
chiefly because she was a comfort to himself; now he loved her for her
own sake.
Moreover, that little flare-up of jealousy in Salome's heart, a flare-up
for which she accused herself before God on her knees--had transformed
her regard for Philip into real love. The calm, lukewarm affection,
sprung out of a sense of duty, had been changed by this spasm into
ardent, passionate love.
That was a cold and colourless world--aloft on the summit of the St.
Gothard Pass, and yet there the beautiful flowers of mutual love and
trust between husband and wife came into blossom.
'Philip,' exclaimed Salome, coming into his room with a letter in her
hand, 'is it not kind of dear Janet? Here is another sweet note from
her, telling me how darling baby is.'
'My dear, I know what a trial it is to you to be parted from him.'
'Oh, Philip--I am with you.' Then opening the letter and showing it
him, 'Only fancy!--my father and Miss Durham have left the Imperial.'
'What--left Andermatt?'
'Yes.'
'Together?'
'I do not know; Janet does not say. And, Philip, she says you are to
mind and get quickly well, for positively next week she and Lambert are
to be married at the Embassy at Berne.'
*CHAPTER LI.*
*AGAIN HYMEN.*
Is there in all Europe a more delightful old-world town than Berne?
There are grander minsters, there are more princely mansions, but there
is no lovelier situation than that occupied by the dear old city perched
on a rock round which the green Aar forms a loop. May the great cancer
of modern Berne that lies in the west never creep over and destroy the
beauty of the ancient town, as the same horrible fungus growth is
disfiguring and killing the charm out of nearly every ancient city on
the Continent. Even our common red-brick houses are better than the
vulgar ash-gray, Jerusalem-artichoke coloured edifices, all staringly
alike, and equally uninteresting, that are growing up in long line and
regular square in imperial Aix, in patrician Nuernberg, in episcopal
Spires, everywhere treading on and trampling out beauty. In a hundred
years, probably, all the great towns of the Middle Ages will have been
transmuted from gold to lead, and be utterly unattractive. When we see
a ruin of a church, an abbey, a castle, an old manor-house, even of a
straw-thatched cottage, we are sad, for we think what they were,
beautiful in their several ways, and all having lost much by becoming
ruins. But of these modern edifices everything we can say is that we
live in hope that they may become ruins, for then only can they
conceivably touch the picturesque. In England, our builders have
grasped the truth that there is beauty in a broken skyline, and in
alternation of light and shadow in a frontage; but on the Continent, in
France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, no architect has risen
above the idea of drawing parallel lines, and of making of every street
an elementary study in perspective.
On a brilliant summer day, when the sun was streaming down out of a
perfectly-blue sky into the long main street of Berne, alive with
marketers, three cabs drew up at the entrance to the Hotel of the Wild
Man, near the Clock-tower, and from them stepped, in the first place, a
young man in light-gray trousers and lavender gloves, and then a young
and pretty lady wearing a bridal veil, a wedding-dress of silver gray.
From the second carriage descended three bridesmaids--no other than the
Labarte girls--and from the third cab Mrs. Sidebottom and Philip and
Salome.
Captain Pennycomequick had been married at the Embassy to Janet Baynes,
and if the day's weather gave a true presage of the new life entered on,
that of the captain and his bride was likely to be a happy one. But
there were surer grounds on which to base a forecast of their hymeneal
condition than the state of the weather. The captain was an amiable
man, whom nothing would rouse to opposition, and Janet, as he and his
mother had ascertained, was very comfortably off. She had or would have
about five hundred a year, and five hundred per annum in France, where
they intended to live, would allow of their enjoying themselves as much
as if they had double that sum in England, not necessarily because
things were cheaper in France, but because popular opinion allowed
retrenchment in a thousand of those trifles which in England are the
great outlets that let money leak away.
There was to be no wedding-tour; not because Janet did not desire to
escape with the captain from the rest of the party, but because the
Labarte girls absolutely refused to be parted with. They had suddenly
woke to the discovery that Mrs. Sidebottom had hoodwinked them, had
carried them away out of sight and hearing whilst love-making was in
progress; a veil had been torn from before their eyes, and they saw
through all her dodges and subterfuges, and were in combined mutiny and
angry protest. Henceforth nothing would sever them from their aunt. A
great opportunity had been lost through the craft of that designing old
woman, a passion on a grand scale had raged, so to speak, under their
noses, and they had not sniffed it. Their attention had been drawn
away, and they had been unable to make those interesting and instructive
studies in the process of love-making to its grand climax in proposal,
which might have been theirs and been to them of incalculable interest
and advantage, but for that dreadful Sidebottom. Thus--if they could no
longer take observations in the conduct of lovers, they could examine,
and store up their observations on the conduct of newly-married people
in the honeymoon. They clung to their aunt, with their arms about her
neck, they lavished expressions of tenderness, they protested that they
could not and would not be separated from her; and Janet foresaw that a
wedding-tour encumbered with the Labarte girls would be worse than none
at all, or one with the Labarte girls plus Mrs. Sidebottom, and Salome
and Philip to draw them off from her occasionally. As the party drove
from the Embassy, Mrs. Sidebottom said to Philip:
'By the way, what do you think? Wonders will never cease. Did you see
the entries in the marriage register previous to those made by Lamb and
Janet?'
'I did not look.'
'_I_ did; and whilst you were arranging about fees I made inquiries.
There was a marriage at the Embassy this morning, before our affair. An
unheard-of thing in Berne to have two English weddings the same day, so
the chaplain said.'
'I dare say.'
'And guess who they were who entered the holy bonds.'
'I really cannot. I know none likely.'
'But you do know, and are quite able to guess.'
'I have not the energy, then.'
'Why, Colonel Yeo, that is to say, Earl Schofield and our friend at
Andermatt, Miss Durham.'
'Nonsense!' Philip was startled.
'It is a fact. I suppose he really is an earl, for he was entered in
the register as Earl Schofield, and not as Colonel Beaple Yeo.'
'But,' Philip stammered, 'it is not possible; he cannot.'
'He has. I saw the entries. They were married half an hour before we
arrived.'
'I will inquire about it,' said Philip, 'as soon as ever the carriage
stops. I will go back to the Embassy. Something must be done. He had
no right to marry.'
'Why not?'
Philip did not answer. He was excited and uneasy.
'You cannot go till after the breakfast,' said Mrs. Sidebottom, 'and I
suppose it is too late to forbid the banns. I presume he is really an
earl. He says that the attainder is up. He truly is a
distinguished-mannered man, and I like him. He looks a nobleman.'
In the evening the entire party visited the Schanzli, a garden or
restaurant on a commanding hill above Berne, once occupied by a fort
from which it takes its name. From the terrace is seen the range of the
Oberland mountains, and, in the middle distance below, is the town
viewed in its full length with towers and spires, and gabled roofs of
chocolate-brown tile. Visitors are attended on by waitresses in the
pretty costume of the canton.
The evening was lovely, a meet conclusion to so bright a day. The
setting sun illumined the distant snows of the giants of the Oberland,
and quivered in the windows of the city below. There are epoch-making
scenes in life, scenes to which the memory recurs with unalloyed
pleasure, scenes which have been revelations of beauty or majesty to the
soul, and such a scene is that from the Schanzli to the visitor who is
there for the first time. It is a double revelation to him--the
splendour of the glacier mountain world, and simultaneously with it a
realization of the beauty, the charm of that old world of the Middle
Ages which is being remorselessly and surely effaced, and on which in
another century the men of that generation will be unable to look, or
will know of it only a few scattered monuments, set in wastes of
hideousness, and judge of it only as one might judge of the ocean by
contemplating a few shells dug out of a chalk bed.
The party of Pennycomequick-Sidebottom-Labarte had settled itself to a
marble-topped, or, to be more exact, imitation marble-topped table, and
had ordered the waitress to bring the _carte_ of wines and meats, when
Claudine Labarte nudged her aunt, and whispered:
'See! see! There they are, M. le Comte de Schoville and our dear
Artemise. Shall we go to them?'
'On no account,' said Mrs. Penycombe-Quick, that is to say Janet,
hastily. 'Besides,' she looked in the same direction, 'they do not seem
to desire our interference.'
All looked at the little table, not far distant, where sat Beaple Yeo,
alias Schofield, and his bride. The same day that had smiled on Lambert
and Janet had laughed over them, but without sure augury of calm weather
apparently; for already a post-nuptial storm had broken loose. Beaple
Yeo was leaning back in his green-painted iron chair, very red and
blotched in face, and opposite him was Artemisia whom he had just made
his wife, flushed and talking rapidly.
It was clear that they were in angry altercation--about what could not
be learned--for their voices were drowned by the music from the little
theatre in the grounds, in which the overture to Boildieu's 'Jean de
Paris' was being performed.
Beaple Yeo curled his whisker round his forefinger, and said something
in reply to a discharge of angry words from Artemisia; whatever it was
that he said, it so stung her that, losing all self-control, she sprang
to her feet, leaned across the table, and struck him on the cheek.
Beaple lost his equilibrium, and went over with his chair on the gravel
of the terrace, to the great amusement of the Swiss waitress, and of the
scattered visitors at the tables, who had noticed the altercation.
Artemisia was startled at her own violence, and ashamed; she looked
round, and caught sight of the friends she had made at Andermatt. Her
colour was so heightened with passion that it could not become deeper
with shame. Instead of resuming her seat, without regarding the
humiliated man who was picking himself up from the ground, she came
directly to the table where the party of Pennycomequick-Sidebottom was
seated, and with heaving bosom and flashing eye, she stood before
Philip, and said in a tone broken with excitement: 'You have helped to
deceive me. It was mean--it was cruel! You insulted me first of all,
and then you conspired with this--this man to play me a base trick. It
was unworthy of a gentleman, of an Englishman.'
'I beg your pardon,' said Philip; 'I do not understand of what you are
speaking. I am quite unaware that I ever deceived you.'
'You told me he was a nobleman--an earl--and he is nothing of the kind.'
'I never said he was.'
'I asked you, and you answered me that he was an earl.'
'I did no such thing. You misunderstood me. You asked me whether he
had any right to the title of Earl of Schofield, and I answered--I
recall exactly my words--that he was perfectly justified in calling
himself Earle Schofield. That is his name. Whether he has any right to
call himself Beaple Yeo, and to claim to be a colonel, is another matter
on which I entertain grave doubts; but I have none whatever that his
surname is Schofield, and that his Christian name is Earle.'
Artemisia did not speak for a minute, she was very angry and ashamed.
When she had in some measure recovered her self-possession, she said
bitterly: 'You might have been more explicit.'
'I refused to say much about the man. I had my reasons. Moreover, I
had no idea that the matter was one of importance to you.'
'I have sold myself to him. I have married him this day, and only now
have discovered that I have been basely imposed upon.'
'It is I--I who have been taken in,' shouted Yeo, coming forward,
pushing to the table, regardless of the shrinking fear that appeared in
the faces of Salome and Janet. 'It is I,' he repeated, 'I that have
been deceived. I was led to believe you were a wealthy American, worth
hundreds of thousands of dollars--and--and I want to know where is the
money? You are an adventuress.'
'And you are an adventurer,' laughed Artemisia. 'Perhaps we have taken
each other in, and we are both fools to have been so easily deceived.
Who told you I was a rich American heiress?'
'The waiter at the Imperial.'
'And he told me you were a rich milord.'
'I want to know what you really are,' said Yeo, who was also very
angry--angry and disappointed. 'I have a right to know who or what
manner of person I have married.'
'And I,' said Artemisia, 'I also want to know who and what manner of
person I have married.'
'That, perhaps, I can tell you,' said Philip gravely. 'But not in the
presence of these ladies. Mr. Schofield, or whatever you call yourself,
I will trouble you to return to your table, or reseat yourself where you
were. I see the waitress is in alarm lest she should lose payment for
what you ordered and have consumed.'
Beaple Yeo sulkily went back to his place. Philip with a sign, showed
Artemisia that he desired her to follow. She obeyed. When they were
beyond earshot of Mrs. Sidebottom, Salome, and the rest, Philip said,
standing by the little table, 'Mr. Schofield, I also wish to ask of you
a question.'
'I am ready, my dear boy, to be put through my catechism,' answered Yeo,
with recovered assurance. 'If you want the pedigree of Schofield, I have
it at my fingers' ends.'
'It is not the pedigree so much as the alliances of Earle Schofield that
interest me,' said Philip.
'Oh, the Schofields have been allied with the best blood in the land,
better than your twopenny-ha'penny manufacturers.'
'I must ask you to tell me whether, before you married Miss Durham at
the Embassy to-day, you had ascertained that an alliance--not a very
high one--was at an end.'
'What do you mean?' asked Yeo, with his face slightly changing colour.
'You may happen to remember Ann Dewis, the coal-barge woman, whom you
married at Hull some sixteen years ago?'
Beaple uttered a low oath.
'I have reason to know,' continued Philip, 'that she is alive--and you
know that she is so, as well as I do. Miss Durham, this fellow had no
right to marry you. His legitimate wife is still alive; no countess,
but a vulgar old woman who owns and works a coal-barge on the Keld-dale
Canal. He has a son by her. One good turn deserves another, and as you
did me a real kindness at the hospice I repay it by freeing you from a
degrading union just contracted with this wretched man, who is a mere
adventurer and swindler. And now, one word with you, Schofield. The
evidence of your bigamy is at hand. Take care that you never show your
face at Mergatroyd to annoy me or my wife, or that you trouble Janet--if
you do I shall have you immediately arrested on a charge of felony, for
what you have done to-day.'
*CHAPTER LII.*
*THE DEVIL'S KNELL.*
In Carisbrooke Castle is a deep well, three hundred feet in depth, and,
in order to draw the water, there is contrived a great wooden drum or
wheel, which, when turned, draws up the bucket. Within the wheel stands
a donkey, and it turns it by stepping on as if walking, although, in
fact, the animal never advances an inch, for, as it moves, the wheel
revolves under its feet. One ass was known to perform this task for
fifty years, and another for forty years. There is, unless we guard
against it, a tendency in ourselves to fall into the same
routine--tramping, tramping on, over the same ground, in the same
unambitious manner, neither advancing in our course, nor varying our
horizon.
The acquaintance with Miss Durham had wrought much good in Salome as
well as in Philip. She had opened his eyes to see his ignorance of
himself, and hers to her ignorance of the world. Salome's previous
existence had been within a narrow sphere. Shut off by peculiar
circumstances from forming many acquaintances and having many friends,
with her horizon contracted almost within the walls of the dingy and
ugly red-brick house occupied by the Pennycomequicks, uncle and nephew,
there can be no doubt but that she would in time have settled into a
condition little superior to that of the Carisbrooke ass. Her mind
would have trotted round and round in the same drum, and have
accommodated itself without a murmur or a thought of resistance to it.
In the course of years she would have become almost as ordinary, as
petty-minded as the deceased Mrs. Cusworth. But contact with Miss Durham
had startled her out of this intellectual donkeydom. She saw in the
American girl a vivacity of interest, a breadth of view, a sparkle of
intelligence, a receptivity for novel ideas, and a knowledge of the
world and of the things in the world--the currents that circulated in
it, the forces that propelled its waves and directed its tides, to which
she had been completely strange. And this stimulated in her the desire
to know. An American gentleman once said to the writer, 'We have no
prejudices, therefore we are always learning.' That is the secret of
American success in every branch of activity. Self-conceit breeds
pig-headedness, which raises mountains of prejudice in our way,
preventing us from seeing, as the Germans have it, that there are men
beyond these mountains. Salome had noticed that Miss Durham was able at
once, and without effort, to arrest the interest and enchain the
attention of Philip, and this she attributed to the possession of
qualities in the Chicago girl which were dormant, if not non-existent,
in herself. She had the shrewdness to perceive, and the good sense to
acknowledge, her own ignorance and inability to take part in
conversation when it turned on politics, natural history, on music, art,
or social questions of the day. She could talk about recipes for
tapioca and semolina puddings, what proportion of water should be put
with milk for a baby, the delinquencies of servants, the sermons she
heard, the hymns she sang in church, the cutting-out and style of a
dress, but not on much beyond. Being humble-minded, she was ready to
take to heart what she recognised, and she studied Miss Durham with
attention, to ascertain the points in which she was accomplished above
her own acquirements.
When ale in bottle turns flat, housewives put in a raisin, and this at
once restores the effervescence. A prudent spouse should have a reserve
of raisins ever by her to pop into her husband's spirits whenever they
are down. Some wives, however, act on the reverse principle, and
perforate the corks, or knock off the necks of all the sparkling liquors
in the cellars of their husbands' hearts. They cannot endure to see
their good men cheery, sanguine, interested, hopeful; they reduce them
all to the state of lymph and insipidity. Such wives when they find
their husbands strung to concert pitch play the domestic accompaniment a
semitone lower, so that the daily music of the household is a discord.
They take the edge off their husband's wit with a sneer, overshadow his
spirits when they sparkle, lash him to anger when he is pleased, and
goad and spur him to madness when they find him jaded and desirous of
repose. By a native perversity they seek to be always at cross purposes
with their husbands, and then grumble because their victims do not smile
and sing on the bed of nettles they have strewn for them.
But Salome was not one who could degenerate into such a mar-peace as
this. In her lowly mind she acknowledged her deficiencies, and as she
was endowed with energy and with excellent abilities, she determined to
remedy these shortcomings in herself, and had the capacity to accomplish
what she resolved.
The forethought of Jeremiah Pennycomequick came to her aid opportunely.
He also, by his holiday of two years, had been thrown out of his drum,
and had found that there was another and a brighter world than that of
the tread-mill. He had discovered, late in life, that all work and no
play makes Jack a dull boy, and not a dull boy only, but a cantankerous
one.
Man is a lantern, and the vivid intellect within is the light; by nature
he is a lantern with many sides, through all of which the interior light
streams, irradiating and bringing into prominence a thousand surrounding
objects. But the pressure of modern life forces him to blacken over one
after another of these sides, and to line each with a reflector, so as
to focus the light, and cast it through a single lens. The stress of
competition, the strain of the social struggle, combine to make of each
man a bull's-eye lantern. It is true that the light so concentrated
illumines such objects as fall within the radius of the beam with
superior brilliancy, but it leaves everything else in more profound
darkness. What is gained in intensity is lost in the periphery.
Jeremiah had discovered this, and more than this. He had learned by his
own weakness to take a more kindly interest in others, to be pitiful
towards their infirmities, patient with their mistakes and even follies.
Having himself tottered irresolute on the edge of the commission of an
extreme act of folly, from which he had been rescued solely by a
providential intervention, he was able to make allowances for lack of
judgment or weakness of resolve in others.
Jeremiah saw that Philip had quarrelled with Salome, and, without
inquiring into the occasion, he understood sufficient of their several
characters to see that the best possible means he could adopt for
reconciling the difference was to give them a holiday together
abroad--to let them travel on the Continent for some time, and mutually
learn much of which both were ignorant. He accordingly wrote to Philip
not to return to Mergatroyd till Christmas. He wished, so he said,
himself to spend some months at the mill in recovering the threads of
the business which had fallen from his fingers, and to settle thoroughly
down again into the old groove of life.
This enabled Philip, who was liberally supplied with money, to visit
Paris, Rome, Milan, Venice, and return to England by the Rhine. He and
Salome made travelling acquaintances, some agreeable, all instructive;
they saw France staggering after its humiliation, and Germany ruffling
in its pride of victory; they shared small adventures, and equally small
jokes such as spring up on all travel, and are as poor to preserve as
the flowers gathered. They saw together picture-galleries, heard
together operas, and together acquired a fund of experience of life in
many aspects unattainable at Mergatroyd. The tour was, as Jeremiah
designed, educative to both, and it broadened and deepened their mutual
sympathies. It did more: it bound them together as chums in the same
school, where both read out of the same books and summed on the same
slate, and wrote out the same moral sentences in their copybooks. As
they learned together, they assisted each other; what escaped the eye of
one was perceived by the other, and each took delight in drawing the
attention of the other to what he or she observed.
They laid up together a fund of pleasant recollections to which to
revert when holiday was over and work began; a shifting diorama of
scenes and incidents and personages that would transform and beautify
the interior of the drum when they were recalled to the obligation of
treading it.
But not so only. When they returned to work, it would be to hope and
scheme for such another excursion together in the future, though perhaps
they could hardly look for another of the same duration. The retrospect
would enrich, and the prospect stimulate, and banish tedium and the
sense of drudgery from their life and work at smoky Mergatroyd.
What veins of interest had, moreover, been opened to both--flowers,
scenery, pictures, music, antiquities, social customs, political
institutions, European history past and that making under their eyes,
such were no longer dead words but living interests, germs of thought,
studies to be pursued at home in the intervals of work, in relaxations
from task, by the aid of books and papers, and in common.
As mention has been made of the saying of an American, the writer
ventures to quote another--the remark made to him by a Belgian. 'I
perceive that when a Flemish shopkeeper has realized a little money over
the necessities of life, he says to himself, "Now I will buy a picture!"
The German under the same circumstances says, "Now my son shall learn
another language!" The American says, "Now I will see the world!" The
Englishman says, "Now I will have salmon, though it is four shillings a
pound." They fill their minds--your man his stomach.'
There have been found toads embedded in stone, which are supposed to
have occupied the same situation for even six thousand years. For six
thousand years their minds have never travelled beyond the cavity in
which, enveloped in obscurity, they have squatted; and men will allow
themselves to settle down into holes exactly fitting them, in which they
will sit out the span of their allotted days in self-complacency,
without an idea beyond it, an ambition outside it.
Indeed, we live upon a Goodwin Sand, that is ready to engulf us, to suck
us down and embed us in its heart, unless we bestir ourselves and resist
the downward suction.
Let the reader look around him and see how many of those he knows are
embedded in their holes as toads, able only to talk about their holes,
to be touched by nothing which does not affect their holes, are
unconcerned about everything save the texture of the stone that encloses
them, and the slime that drapes the walls of their hole.
We do not say that the only means of escape from such bondage and mental
stultification is Continental travel; there are a hundred ways of escape
from petrifaction, if only we will use them, and use them persistently.
In the case under consideration it happened to be the way, and the most
effective way, in which both Philip and Salome escaped from the holes
into which they were about to sink and become sealed up.
But there is one way in which the overplus of money will never help to
deliver us from petrifaction, and that is, by putting it into our
stomachs in the shape of salmon at four shillings a pound.
We remember the case of a very short-sighted man, who had been
short-sighted from infancy. He never wore glasses till he was aged
about five-and-twenty, and then suddenly found himself launched into a
new world, and able to see and take a lively interest in things which
had been hidden from him hitherto. We are all, through life, if we do
not voluntarily become like the toad-hole dwellers, being introduced
into new worlds, whether by the acquisition of a picture like the
Fleming, or by learning a new language, like the German, or by travel,
as the Yankee. Philip and Salome had put on their glasses
simultaneously, and it quickened their affection for each other to be
engaged on the same effort, and to be together in the acquisition of
wisdom and knowledge and experience. Besides this intellectual and
moral bond they had another--certainly at the time not very
intellectual, but a very fast and dear one--the little Philip, who
travelled with them wherever they went, and who wound himself about both
their hearts, and in doing so blended both in one. It was early in life
for the child to begin his travels, but travelling did not hurt him. He
throve on it. Before he said 'Pa,' or 'Ma,' he articulated the syllable
'Go.' As Philip the Greater said, an augury of the young man's future,
as one of action.
At length Philip and Salome were home; and once again Salome flew to the
arms of the dear white-haired old man, whose face had lost all its
hardness and had acquired a new expression of sweetness. And Jeremiah
was able to receive her loving embrace, and to hold her to his breast
without shrinking, without a tremor. The storm had passed and the St.
Luke's summer had set in on his end of life, to be cheered not only by
the presence of Salome, but also by that of Philip the Little, who, it
was clear, would become the pet and idol of old Jeremiah, even more than
he was the pet and idol of his father and mother.
Late at night, in the nursery, at the nursery window on Christmas Eve,
when Philip the Great, and Philip the Little, and Salome were returned
to Mergatroyd, husband and wife stood, looking out into the
star-besprent wintry sky. Salome had her arms round Philip's waist, and
he had his thrown over her shoulder, drawing her to his side, and she
rested her golden head on his breast. The only light in the room came
from the fire; the only sound for some time was the breathing of the
child in its cradle.
Both were happy, and occupied with their own thoughts.
At length Philip broke the silence, and said:
'It is very, very good of Uncle Jeremiah; he has taken me into full
partnership, and what is more, he proposes that he should winter abroad
and return in spring to allow of our then taking a holiday together.'
'And what is he going to do about Mrs. Sidebottom?'
'I cannot say. He is himself undecided. He says that as he laid the
trap into which she fell, he must not be too hard with her. He will see
her himself. He goes after the new year to France when he will visit her
and make some arrangement. He says, but hardly can mean what he says,
that it is a law of nature that persons pinched in circumstances and
pressed for money lose their scruples, as crabs cast their claws, and
lizards drop their tails when nipped or pursued. It is a law of nature
and must be allowed for.'
Philip felt a shudder of protest against his side, but Salome said
nothing.