One of the most difficult lessons for spirited young men to learn is,
that good jokes are not always good policy. They have to be paid for,
like good dinners, though dinner and joke shall seem to have been at
somebody else’s expense. Young Fellingham was treated rudely by Van
Diemen Smith, and with some cold reserve by Annette: in consequence of
which he thought her more than ever commonplace. He wrote her a
letter of playful remonstrance, followed by one that appealed to her
sentiments.
But she replied to neither of them. So his visits to Crikswich came to
an end.
Shall a girl who has no appreciation of fun affect us? Her expressive
eyes, and her quaint simplicity, and her enthusiasm for England, haunted
Mr. Fellingham; being conjured up by contrast with what he met about
him. But shall a girl who would impose upon us the task of holding
in our laughter at Tinman be much regretted? There could be no
companionship between us, Fellingham thought.
On an excursion to the English Lakes he saw the name of Van Diemen
Smith in a visitors’ book, and changed his ideas on the subject of
companionship. Among mountains, or on the sea, or reading history,
Annette was one in a thousand. He happened to be at a public ball
at Helmstone in the Winter season, and who but Annette herself came
whirling before him on the arm of an officer! Fellingham did not miss
his chance of talking to her. She greeted him gaily, and speaking with
the excitement of the dance upon her, appeared a stranger to the serious
emotions he was willing to cherish. She had been to the Lakes and to
Scotland. Next summer she was going to Wales. All her experiences were
delicious. She was insatiable, but satisfied.
“I wish I had been with you,” said Fellingham.
“I wish you had,” said she.
Mrs. Cavely was her chaperon at the ball, and he was not permitted to
enjoy a lengthened conversation sitting with Annette. What was he to
think of a girl who could be submissive to Mrs. Cavely, and danced with
any number of officers, and had no idea save of running incessantly
over England in the pursuit of pleasure? Her tone of saying, “I wish
you had,” was that of the most ordinary of wishes, distinctly, if not
designedly different from his own melodious depth.
She granted him one waltz, and he talked of her father and his whimsical
vagrancies and feeling he had a positive liking for Van Diemen, and he
sagaciously said so.
Annette’s eyes brightened. “Then why do you never go to see him? He has
bought Elba. We move into the Hall after Christmas. We are at the Crouch
at present. Papa will be sure to make you welcome. Do you not know that
he never forgets a friend or breaks a friendship?”
“I do, and I love him for it,” said Fellingham.
If he was not greatly mistaken a gentle pressure on the fingers of his
left hand rewarded him.
This determined him. It should here be observed that he was by birth the
superior of Annette’s parentage, and such is the sentiment of a better
blood that the flattery of her warm touch was needed for him to overlook
the distinction.
Two of his visits to Crikswich resulted simply in interviews and
conversations with Mrs. Crickledon. Van Diemen and his daughter were in
London with Tinman and Mrs. Cavely, purchasing furniture for Elba Hall.
Mrs. Crickledon had no scruple in saying, that Mrs. Cavely meant her
brother to inhabit the Hall, though Mr. Smith had outbid him in the
purchase. According to her, Tinman and Mr. Smith had their differences;
for Mr. Smith was a very outspoken gentleman, and had been known to call
Tinman names that no man of spirit would bear if he was not scheming.
Fellingham returned to London, where he roamed the streets famous for
furniture warehouses, in the vain hope of encountering the new owner of
Elba.
Failing in this endeavour, he wrote a love-letter to Annette.
It was her first. She had liked him. Her manner of thinking she might
love him was through the reflection that no one stood in the way. The
letter opened a world to her, broader than Great Britain.
Fellingham begged her, if she thought favourably of him, to prepare her
father for the purport of his visit. If otherwise, she was to interdict
the visit with as little delay as possible and cut him adrift.
A decided line of conduct was imperative. Yet you have seen that she was
not in love. She was only not unwilling to be in love. And Fellingham
was just a trifle warmed. Now mark what events will do to light the
fires.
Van Diemen and Tinman, old chums re-united, and both successful in
life, had nevertheless, as Mrs. Crickledon said, their differences. They
commenced with an opposition to Tinman’s views regarding the expenditure
of town moneys. Tinman was ever for devoting them to the patriotic
defence of “our shores;” whereas Van Diemen, pointing in detestation
of the town sewerage reeking across the common under the beach, loudly
called on him to preserve our lives, by way of commencement. Then Van
Diemen precipitately purchased Elba at a high valuation, and Tinman had
expected by waiting to buy it at his own valuation, and sell it out
of friendly consideration to his friend afterwards, for a friendly
consideration. Van Diemen had joined the hunt. Tinman could not mount
a horse. They had not quarrelled, but they had snapped about these and
other affairs. Van Diemen fancied Tinman was jealous of his wealth.
Tinman shrewdly suspected Van Diemen to be contemptuous of his dignity.
He suffered a loss in a loan of money; and instead of pitying him, Van
Diemen had laughed him to scorn for expecting security for investments
at ten per cent. The bitterness of the pinch to Tinman made him
frightfully sensitive to strictures on his discretion. In his anguish he
told his sister he was ruined, and she advised him to marry before the
crash. She was aware that he exaggerated, but she repeated her advice.
She went so far as to name the person. This is known, because she
was overheard by her housemaid, a gossip of Mrs. Crickledon’s, the
subsequently famous “Little Jane.”
Now, Annette had shyly intimated to her father the nature of Herbert
Fellingham’s letter, at the same time professing a perfect readiness to
submit to his directions; and her father’s perplexity was very great,
for Annette had rather fervently dramatized the young man’s words at the
ball at Helmstone, which had pleasantly tickled him, and, besides,
he liked the young man. On the other hand, he did not at all like the
prospect of losing his daughter; and he would have desired her to be a
lady of title. He hinted at her right to claim a high position. Annette
shrank from the prospect, saying, “Never let me marry one who might be
ashamed of my father!”
“I shouldn’t stomach that,” said Van Diemen, more disposed in favour of
the present suitor.
Annette was now in a tremor. She had a lover; he was coming. And if he
did not come, did it matter? Not so very much, except to her pride. And
if he did, what was she to say to him? She felt like an actress who may
in a few minutes be called on the stage, without knowing her part. This
was painfully unlike love, and the poor girl feared it would be her
conscientious duty to dismiss him--most gently, of course; and perhaps,
should he be impetuous and picturesque, relent enough to let him hope,
and so bring about a happy postponement of the question. Her father had
been to a neighbouring town on business with Mr. Tinman. He knocked at
her door at midnight; and she, in dread of she knew not what--chiefly
that the Hour of the Scene had somehow struck--stepped out to him
trembling. He was alone. She thought herself the most childish of
mortals in supposing that she could have been summoned at midnight to
declare her sentiments, and hardly noticed his gloomy depression. He
asked her to give him five minutes; then asked her for a kiss, and told
her to go to bed and sleep. But Annette had seen that a great present
affliction was on him, and she would not be sent to sleep. She promised
to listen patiently, to bear anything, to be brave. “Is it bad news from
home?” she said, speaking of the old home where she had not left her
heart, and where his money was invested.
“It’s this, my dear Netty,” said Van Diemen, suffering her to lead him
into her sitting-room; “we shall have to leave the shores of England.”
“Then we are ruined.”
“We’re not; the rascal can’t do that. We might be off to the Continent,
or we might go to America; we’ve money. But we can’t stay here. I’ll not
live at any man’s mercy.”
“The Continent! America!” exclaimed the enthusiast for England. “Oh,
papa, you love living in England so!”
“Not so much as all that, my dear. You do, that I know. But I don’t see
how it’s to be managed. Mart Tinman and I have been at tooth and claw
to-day and half the night; and he has thrown off the mask, or he’s
dashed something from my sight, I don’t know which. I knocked him down.”
“Papa!”
“I picked him up.”
“Oh,” cried Annette, “has Mr. Tinman been hurt?”
“He called me a Deserter!”
Anisette shuddered.
She did not know what this thing was, but the name of it opened a
cabinet of horrors, and she touched her father timidly, to assure him of
her constant love, and a little to reassure herself of his substantial
identity.
“And I am one,” Van Diemen made the confession at the pitch of his
voice. “I am a Deserter; I’m liable to be branded on the back. And it’s
in Mart Tinman’s power to have me marched away to-morrow morning in the
sight of Crikswich, and all I can say for myself, as a man and a Briton,
is, I did not desert before the enemy. That I swear I never would have
done. Death, if death’s in front; but your poor mother was a handsome
woman, my child, and there--I could not go on living in barracks and
leaving her unprotected. I can’t tell a young woman the tale. A hundred
pounds came on me for a legacy, as plump in my hands out of open
heaven, and your poor mother and I saw our chance; we consulted, and we
determined to risk it, and I got on board with her and you, and over the
seas we went, first to shipwreck, ultimately to fortune.”
Van Diemen laughed miserably. “They noticed in the hunting-field here I
had a soldier-like seat. A soldier-like seat it’ll be, with a brand
on it. I sha’n’t be asked to take a soldier-like seat at any of their
tables again. I may at Mart Tinman’s, out of pity, after I’ve undergone
my punishment. There’s a year still to run out of the twenty of my term
of service due. He knows it; he’s been reckoning; he has me. But the
worst cat-o’-nine-tails for me is the disgrace. To have myself pointed
at, ‘There goes the Deserter’ He was a private in the Carbineers, and
he deserted.’ No one’ll say, ‘Ay, but he clung to the idea of his old
schoolmate when abroad, and came back loving him, and trusted him, and
was deceived.”
Van Diemen produced a spasmodic cough with a blow on his chest. Anisette
was weeping.
“There, now go to bed,” said he. “I wish you might have known no more
than you did of our flight when I got you on board the ship with your
poor mother; but you’re a young woman now, and you must help me to think
of another cut and run, and what baggage we can scrape together in a
jiffy, for I won’t live here at Mart Tinman’s mercy.”
Drying her eyes to weep again, Annette said, when she could speak: “Will
nothing quiet him? I was going to bother you with all sorts of silly
questions, poor dear papa; but I see I can understand if I try. Will
nothing--Is he so very angry? Can we not do something to pacify him? He
is fond of money. He--oh, the thought of leaving England! Papa, it will
kill you; you set your whole heart on England. We could--I could--could
I not, do you not think?--step between you as a peacemaker. Mr. Tinman
is always very courteous to me.”
At these words of Annette’s, Van Diemen burst into a short snap of
savage laughter. “But that’s far away in the background, Mr. Mart
Tinman!” he said. “You stick to your game, I know that; but you’ll find
me flown, though I leave a name to stink like your common behind
me. And,” he added, as a chill reminder, “that name the name of my
benefactor. Poor old Van Diemen! He thought it a safe bequest to make.”
“It was; it is! We will stay; we will not be exiled,” said Annette. “I
will do anything. What was the quarrel about, papa?”
“The fact is, my dear, I just wanted to show him--and take down his
pride--I’m by my Australian education a shrewder hand than his old
country. I bought the house on the beach while he was chaffering, and
then I sold it him at a rise when the town was looking up--only to make
him see. Then he burst up about something I said of Australia. I will
have the common clean. Let him live at the Crouch as my tenant if he
finds the house on the beach in danger.”
“Papa, I am sure,” Annette repeated--“sure I have influence with Mr.
Tinman.”
“There are those lips of yours shutting tight,” said her father. “Just
listen, and they make a big O. The donkey! He owns you’ve got influence,
and he offers he’ll be silent if you’ll pledge your word to marry him.
I’m not sure he didn’t say, within the year. I told him to look sharp
not to be knocked down again. Mart Tinman for my son-in-law! That’s
an upside down of my expectations, as good as being at the antipodes
without a second voyage back! I let him know you were engaged.”
Annette gazed at her father open-mouthed, as he had predicted; now with
a little chilly dimple at one corner of the mouth, now at another--as a
breeze curves the leaden winter lake here and there. She could not
get his meaning into her sight, and she sought, by looking hard, to
understand it better; much as when some solitary maiden lady, passing
into her bedchamber in the hours of darkness, beholds--tradition telling
us she has absolutely beheld foot of burglar under bed; and lo! she
stares, and, cunningly to moderate her horror, doubts, yet cannot but
believe that there is a leg, and a trunk, and a head, and two terrible
arms, bearing pistols, to follow. Sick, she palpitates; she compresses
her trepidation; she coughs, perchance she sings a bar or two of an
aria. Glancing down again, thrice horrible to her is it to discover that
there is no foot! For had it remained, it might have been imagined a
harmless, empty boot. But the withdrawal has a deadly significance of
animal life....
In like manner our stricken Annette perceived the object; so did she
gradually apprehend the fact of her being asked for Tinman’s bride, and
she could not think it credible. She half scented, she devised her
plan of escape from another single mention of it. But on her father’s
remarking, with a shuffle, frightened by her countenance, “Don’t listen
to what I said, Netty. I won’t paint him blacker than he is”--then
Annette was sure she had been proposed for by Mr. Tinman, and she
fancied her father might have revolved it in his mind that there
was this means of keeping Tinman silent, silent for ever, in his own
interests.
“It was not true, when you told Mr. Tinman I was engaged, papa,” she
said.
“No, I know that. Mart Tinman only half-kind of hinted. Come, I say!
Where’s the unmarried man wouldn’t like to have a girl like you, Netty!
They say he’s been rejected all round a circuit of fifteen miles; and
he’s not bad-looking, neither--he looks fresh and fair. But I thought
it as well to let him know he might get me at a disadvantage, but he
couldn’t you. Now, don’t think about it, my love.”
“Not if it is not necessary, papa,” said Annette; and employed her
familiar sweetness in persuading him to go to bed, as though he were the
afflicted one requiring to be petted.