"Won't he ever eat any dinner till he's got over it?" I asked.
She looked round sharply at me, but apparently decided that I was only
foolish.
"You wait till your time comes," she answered, shaking her curls at me.
"You won't care much about your dinner--not if you are _really_ in love."
In the night, about half-past eleven, I heard, as I thought, footsteps in
the passage, and creeping to the door and opening it I saw the figure of
my friend in dressing-gown and slippers, vanishing down the stairs. My
idea was that, his brain weakened by trouble, he had developed
sleep-walking tendencies. Partly out of curiosity, partly to watch over
him, I slipped on a pair of trousers and followed him.
He placed his candle on the kitchen table and made a bee-line for the
pantry door, from where he subsequently emerged with two pounds of cold
beef on a plate and about a quart of beer in a jug; and I came away,
leaving him fumbling for pickles.
I assisted at his wedding, where it seemed to me he endeavoured to
display more ecstasy than it was possible for any human being to feel;
and fifteen months later, happening to catch sight of an advertisement in
the births column of _The Times_, I called on my way home from the City
to congratulate him. He was pacing up and down the passage with his hat
on, pausing at intervals to partake of an uninviting-looking meal,
consisting of a cold mutton chop and a glass of lemonade, spread out upon
a chair. Seeing that the cook and the housemaid were wandering about the
house evidently bored for want of something to do, and that the dining-
room, where he would have been much more out of the way, was empty and
quite in order, I failed at first to understand the reason for his
deliberate choice of discomfort. I, however, kept my reflections to
myself, and inquired after the mother and child.
"Couldn't be better," he replied with a groan. "The doctor said he'd
never had a more satisfactory case in all his experience."
"Oh, I'm glad to hear that," I answered; "I was afraid you'd been
worrying yourself."
"Worried!" he exclaimed. "My dear boy, I don't know whether I'm standing
on my head or my heels" (he gave one that idea). "This is the first
morsel of food that's passed my lips for twenty-four hours."
At this moment the nurse appeared at the top of the stairs. He flew
towards her, upsetting the lemonade in his excitement.
"What is it?" he asked hoarsely. "Is it all right?"
The old lady glanced from him to his cold chop, and smiled approvingly.
"They're doing splendidly," she answered, patting him on the shoulder in
a motherly fashion. "Don't you worry."
"I can't help it, Mrs. Jobson," he replied, sitting down upon the bottom
stair, and leaning his head against the banisters.
"Of course you can't," said Mrs. Jobson admiringly; "and you wouldn't be
much of a man if you could." Then it was borne in upon me why he wore
his hat, and dined off cold chops in the passage.
The following summer they rented a picturesque old house in Berkshire,
and invited me down from a Saturday to Monday. Their place was near the
river, so I slipped a suit of flannels in my bag, and on the Sunday
morning I came down in them. He met me in the garden. He was dressed in
a frock coat and a white waistcoat; and I noticed that he kept looking at
me out of the corner of his eye, and that he seemed to have a trouble on
his mind. The first breakfast bell rang, and then he said, "You haven't
got any proper clothes with you, have you?"
"Proper clothes!" I exclaimed, stopping in some alarm. "Why, has
anything given way?"
"No, not that," he explained. "I mean clothes to go to church in."
"Church," I said. "You're surely not going to church a fine day like
this? I made sure you'd be playing tennis, or going on the river. You
always used to."
"Yes," he replied, nervously flicking a rose-bush with a twig he had
picked up. "You see, it isn't ourselves exactly. Maud and I would
rather like to, but our cook, she's Scotch, and a little strict in her
notions."
"And does she insist on your going to church every Sunday morning?" I
inquired.
"Well," he answered, "she thinks it strange if we don't, and so we
generally do, just in the morning--and evening. And then in the
afternoon a few of the village girls drop in, and we have a little
singing and that sort of thing. I never like hurting anyone's feelings
if I can help it."
I did not say what I thought. Instead I said, "I've got that tweed suit
I wore yesterday. I can put that on if you like."
He ceased flicking the rose-bush, and knitted his brows. He seemed to be
recalling it to his imagination.
"No," he said, shaking his head, "I'm afraid it would shock her. It's my
fault, I know," he added, remorsefully. "I ought to have told you."
Then an idea came to him.
"I suppose," he said, "you wouldn't care to pretend you were ill, and
stop in bed just for the day?"
I explained that my conscience would not permit my being a party to such
deception
"No, I thought you wouldn't," he replied. "I must explain it to her. I
think I'll say you've lost your bag. I shouldn't like her to think bad
of us."
Later on a fourteenth cousin died, leaving him a large fortune. He
purchased an estate in Yorkshire, and became a "county family," and then
his real troubles began.
From May to the middle of August, save for a little fly fishing, which
generally resulted in his getting his feet wet and catching a cold, life
was fairly peaceful; but from early autumn to late spring he found the
work decidedly trying. He was a stout man, constitutionally nervous of
fire-arms, and a six-hours' tramp with a heavy gun across ploughed
fields, in company with a crowd of careless persons who kept blazing away
within an inch of other people's noses, harassed and exhausted him. He
had to get out of bed at four on chilly October mornings to go
cub-hunting, and twice a week throughout the winter--except when a
blessed frost brought him a brief respite--he had to ride to hounds. That
he usually got off with nothing more serious than mere bruises and slight
concussions of the spine, he probably owed to the fortunate circumstances
of his being little and fat. At stiff timber he shut his eyes and rode
hard; and ten yards from a river he would begin to think about bridges.
Yet he never complained.
"If you are a country gentleman," he would say, "you must behave as a
country gentleman, and take the rough with the smooth."
As ill fate would have it a chance speculation doubled his fortune, and
it became necessary that he should go into Parliament and start a yacht.
Parliament made his head ache, and the yacht made him sick.
Notwithstanding, every summer he would fill it with a lot of expensive
people who bored him, and sail away for a month's misery in the
Mediterranean.
During one cruise his guests built up a highly-interesting gambling
scandal. He himself was confined to his cabin at the time, and knew
nothing about it; but the Opposition papers, getting hold of the story,
referred casually to the yacht as a "floating hell," and _The Police
News_ awarded his portrait the place of honour as the chief criminal of
the week.
Later on he got into a cultured set, ruled by a thick-lipped
undergraduate. His favourite literature had hitherto been of the Corelli
and _Tit-Bits_ order, but now he read Meredith and the yellow book, and
tried to understand them; and instead of the Gaiety, he subscribed to the
Independent Theatre, and fed "his soul," on Dutch Shakespeares. What he
liked in art was a pretty girl by a cottage-door with an eligible young
man in the background, or a child and a dog doing something funny. They
told him these things were wrong and made him buy "Impressions" that
stirred his liver to its deepest depths every time he looked at
them--green cows on red hills by pink moonlight, or scarlet-haired
corpses with three feet of neck.
He said meekly that such seemed to him unnatural, but they answered that
nature had nothing to do with the question; that the artist saw things
like that, and that whatever an artist saw--no matter in what condition
he may have been when he saw it--that was art.
They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones's private views. They
read him all the minor poets. They booked seats for him at all Ibsen's
plays. They introduced him into all the most soulful circles of artistic
society. His days were one long feast of other people's enjoyments.
One morning I met him coming down the steps of the Arts Club. He looked
weary. He was just off to a private view at the New Gallery. In the
afternoon he had to attend an amateur performance of "The Cenci," given
by the Shelley Society. Then followed three literary and artistic At
Homes, a dinner with an Indian nabob who couldn't speak a word of
English, "Tristam and Isolde" at Covent Garden Theatre, and a ball at
Lord Salisbury's to wind up the day.