There was a war of supremacy in the Kendal household. Albinia and her
son were Greek to Greek, and if physical force were on her side, her
own tenderness was against her. As to allies, Maurice had by far the
majority of the household; the much-tormented Susan was her mistress’s
sole supporter; Mr. Kendal and Sophy might own it inexpedient to foster
his outrecuidance, but they so loved to do his bidding, so hated to
thwart him, and so grieved at his being punished, that they were little
better than Gilbert, Lucy, grandmamma, or any of the maids or men.
The moral sense was not yet stirred, and the boy seemed to be trying the
force of his will like the strength of his limbs. Even as he delighted
to lift a weight the moment he saw that it was heavy, so a command was
to him a challenge to see how much he would undergo rather than obey,
but his resistance was so open, gay, and free, that it could hardly be
called obstinacy, and he gloried in disappointing punishment. The dark
closet lost all terror for him; he stood there blowing the horn through
his hand, content to follow an imaginary chase, and when untimely sent
to bed, he stole Susan’s scissors, and cut a range of stables in the
sheets. The short, sharp infliction of pain answered best, but his
father, though he could give a shake when angry, could _not_ strike when
cool, and Albinia was forced to turn executioner, though with such tears
and trembling that her culprit looked up reassuringly, saying, ‘Never
mind, mamma, I shan’t!’ He did, however, _mind_ her tears, they bore in
upon him the sense of guilt; and after each transgression, he could not
be at peace till he had marched up to her, holding out his hand for the
blow, and making up his face not to wince, and then would cling round
her neck to feel himself pardoned. Justice came to him in a most fair
and motherly shape! The brightest, the merriest of all his playmates
was mamma; he loved her passionately, and could endure no cloud between
himself and her, so that he was slowly learning that submission to her
was peace and pleasure, and rebellion mere pain to both. She established
ten minutes of daily lessons, but even she could not reach beyond the
capture of his restless person, his mind was out of reach, and keen as
he was in everything else, towards “a + b = ab” he was an unmitigated
dunce. Nor did he obey any one who did not use authority and force
of will, and though perfectly simple and sincere, he was too young to
restrain himself without the assistance of the controlling power, so
that in his mother’s absence he was tyrannical and violent, and she
never liked to have him out of her sight, and never was so sure that he
was deep in mischief as when she had not heard his voice for a quarter
of an hour.
‘Albinia,’ said Mr. Kendal, one relenting autumn day, when November
strove to look like April, ‘I thought of walking to pay Farmer Graves
for the corn. Will you come with me?’
‘Delightful, I want to see what Maurice will say to the turkey-cock.’
‘Is it not too far for him?’
‘He would run quite as many miles in the garden,’ said Albinia, who
would have walked in dread of a court of justice on her return, had not
the scarlet hose been safely prancing on the road before her.
‘This way, then,’ said Mr. Kendal; ‘I must get this draft changed at the
bank. Come, Maurice, you will see a friend there.’
‘Do you know, Edmund,’ said Albinia, as they set forth, ‘my conscience
smites me as to that youth; I think we have neglected him.’
‘I cannot see what more we could have done. If his uncle does not bring
him forward in society, we cannot interfere.’
‘It must be a forlorn condition,’ said Albinia; ‘he is above the other
clerks, and he seems to be voted below the Bayford Elite, since the
Polysyllable has made it so very refined! One never meets him anywhere
now it is too dark to walk after the banking hours. Cannot we ask him to
come in some evening?’
‘We cannot have our evenings broken up,’ said Mr. Kendal. ‘I should be
glad to show him any kindness, but his uncle seems to have ruled it that
he is to be considered more as his clerk than as one of his family, and
I doubt if it would be doing him any service to interfere.’
They were now at the respectable old freestone building, with
‘Goldsmith’ inscribed on the iron window-blinds, and a venerable date
carved over the door. Inside, those blinds came high, and let in
but little light over the tall desks, at which were placed the
black-horsehair perches of the clerks, old Mr. Goldsmith himself
occupying a lower throne, more accessible to the clients. One of the
high stools stood empty, and Albinia making inquiry, Mr. Goldsmith
answered, with a dry, dissatisfied cough, that More, as he called him,
had struck work, and gone home with a headache.
‘Indeed,’ said Albinia, ‘I am sorry to hear it. Mr. Hope said he thought
him not looking well.’
‘He has complained of headache a good deal lately,’ said Mr. Goldsmith.
‘Young men don’t find it easy to settle to business.’
Albinia’s heart smote her for not having thought more of her son’s
rescuer, and she revolved what could or what might have been done.
It really was not easy to show him attention, considering Gilbert’s
prejudice against his accent, and Mr. Kendal’s dislike to an interrupted
evening, and all she could devise was a future call on Miss Goldsmith.
But for Maurice, it would have been a silent walk, and though her mind
was a little diverted by his gallant attempt to bestride the largest pig
in the farm-yard, she was sure Mr. Kendal was musing on the same topic,
and was not surprised when, as they returned, he exclaimed, ‘I have a
great mind to go and see after that poor lad.’
‘This way, then,’ said Albinia, turning down a narrow muddy street
parallel with the river.
‘Impossible!’ said Mr. Kendal; ‘he can never live at the Wharves?’
‘Yes,’ said Albinia; ‘he told me that he lodged with an old servant of
the Goldsmiths, Pratt’s wife, at the Lower Wharf.’
She pointed to the name of Pratt over a shop-window in a house that
had once seen better days, but which looked so forlorn, that Mr.
Kendal would not look the slatternly maid in the face while so absurd a
question was asked as whether Mr. O’More lived there.
The girl, without further ceremony, took them up a dark stair, and
opened the door of a twilight room, where Albinia’s first glimpse showed
her the young man with his head bent down on his arms on the table, as
close as possible to the forlorn, black fire, of the grim, dull, sulky
coal of the county, which had filled the room with smoke and blacks. The
window, opened to clear it, only admitted the sickly scent of decaying
weed from the river to compete with the perfume of the cobbler’s
stock-in-trade. Ulick started up pale and astonished, and Mr. Kendal,
struck with consternation, chiefly thought of taking away his wife and
child from the infected atmosphere, and made signs to Albinia not to sit
down; but she was eagerly compassionate.
‘It was nothing,’ said Ulick, ‘only his head was rather worse than
usual, and he thought it time to give in when the threes put lapwings’
feathers in their caps just like the fives.’
‘Are you subject to these headaches?’
‘It is only home-sickness,’ he said. ‘I’ll have got over it soon.’
‘I must come and see after you, my good friend,’ said Mr. Kendal, with
suppressed impatience and anxiety. ‘I shall return in a moment or two,
but I am sure you are not well enough for so many visitors taking you by
surprise. Come.’
He was so peremptory, that Albinia found herself on the staircase before
she knew what she was about. The fever panic had seized Mr. Kendal
in full force; he believed typhus was in the air, and insisted on her
taking Maurice home at once, while he went himself to fetch Mr. Bowles.
She did not in the least credit fever to be in the chill touch of that
lizard hand, and believed that she could have been the best doctor; but
there was no arguing while he was under this alarm, and she knew that
she might be thankful not to be ordered to observe a quarantine.
When Mr. Kendal returned home he looked much discomposed, though his
first words were, ‘Thank Heaven, it is no fever! Albinia, we must look
after that poor lad; he is positively poisoned by that pestiferous river
and bad living! Bowles said he was sure he was not eating meat enough.
I dare say that greasy woman gives him nothing fit to eat! Albinia,
you must talk to him--find out whether old Goldsmith gives him a decent
salary!’
‘He ought not to be in those lodgings another day. I suppose Miss
Goldsmith had no notion what they were. I fancy she never saw the Lower
Wharf in her life.’
‘I never did till to-day,’ said Mr. Kendal. ‘It was all of a piece--the
whole street--the room--the furniture--why the paper was coming off the
walls! What could they be dreaming of! And there he was, trying to read
a little edition of Prodentius, printed at Salamanca, which he picked up
at a bookstall at Galway. It must have belonged to some priest educated
in Spain. He says any Latin book was invaluable to him. He is infinitely
too good for his situation, and the Goldsmiths are neglecting him
infamously. Look out some rooms fit for him, Albinia.’
‘I will try. Let me see--if I could only recollect any; but Mr. Hope has
the only really nice ones in the place.’
‘Somewhere he must be, if it is in this house.’
‘There is poor old Madame Belmarche’s still empty, with Bridget keeping
it. I wish he could have rooms there.’
‘Well, why not? Pettilove told me it must be let as two tenements. If
the old woman could take half, a lodger would pay her rent,’ said Mr.
Kendal, promptly. ‘You had better propose it.’
‘And the Goldsmiths?’ asked Albinia.
‘I will show him the Lower Wharf.’
The next afternoon Mr. Kendal desired his wife to go to the Bank and
borrow young O’More for her walking companion.
‘Really I don’t know whether I have the impudence.’
‘I will come and do it for you. You will do best alone with the lad; I
want you to get into his confidence, and find out whether old Goldsmith
treats him properly. I declare, but that I know John Kendal so well,
this would be enough to make me rejoice that Gilbert is not thrown on
the world!’
Albinia knew herself to be so tactless, that she saw little hope other
doing anything but setting him against his relations; but her husband
was in no frame to hear objections, so she made none, and only trusted
she should not be very foolish. At least, the walk would be a positive
physical benefit to the slave of the desk.
Ulick O’More was at his post, and said his head was well, but his hair
stuck up as if his fingers had been many times run through it; he was
much thinner, and the wearied countenance, whitened complexion, and
spiritless sunken eyes, were a sad contrast to the glowing freshness and
life that had distinguished him in the summer.
Mr. Kendal told the Banker that it had been decided that his nephew
needed exercise, and that Mrs. Kendal would be glad of his company in
a long walk. Mr. Goldsmith seemed rather surprised, but consented,
whereupon the young clerk lighted up into animation, and bounded out of
his prison house, with a springy step learnt upon mountain heather. Mr.
Kendal only waited to hear whither they were bound.
‘Oh! as far as we can go on the Woodside road,’ said Albinia. ‘I think
the prescription I used to inflict on poor Sophy will not be thrown away
here. I always fancy there is a whiff of sea air upon the hill there.’
Ulick smiled at such a fond delusion, bred up as he had been upon the
wildest sea-coast, exposed to the full sweep of the Atlantic storm! She
set him off upon his own scenery, to the destruction of his laborious
English, as he dwelt on the glories of his beloved rocks rent by fierce
sea winds and waves into fantastic, grotesque, or lovely shapes, with
fiords of exquisite blue sea between, the variety of which had been to
him as the gentle foliage of tamer countries. Not a tree stood near the
‘town’ of Ballymakilty, but the wild crags, the sparkling waters, the
broad open hills, and the bogs, with their intensely purple horizon,
held fast upon his heart; and he told of white sands, reported to be
haunted by mermaids, and crevices of rock where the tide roared, and
gave rise to legends of sea monsters, and giants turned to stone. He
was becoming confidential and intimate when, in a lowered voice, he
mentioned the Banshee’s crag, where the shrouded messenger of doom never
failed to bewail each dying child of the O’More, and where his own old
nurse had actually beheld her keening for the uncle who was killed among
the Caffres. Albinia began to know how she ought to respect the O’Mores.
They were skirting the side of the hill, with a dip of green meadow-land
below them, rising on the other side into coppices. The twang of the
horn, and the babbling cry of the hounds, reminded Albinia that the
hunting season had begun, and looking over a gate, she watched the
parti-coloured forms of the dogs glancing among the brushwood opposite,
and an occasional red coat gleaming out through the hedge above. Just
then the cry ceased, the dogs became silent, and scattered hither and
thither bewildered. Ulick looked eagerly, then suddenly vaulted over the
gate, went forward a few steps, looked again, pointed towards some dark
object which she could barely discern, put his finger in his ear,
and uttered an unearthly screech, incomprehensible to her, but well
understood by the huntsman, and through him by the dogs, which at once
simultaneously dashed in one direction, and came pouring into the meadow
over towards him, down went their heads, up went their curved tails, the
clatter and rushing of hoofs, and the apparition of red coats, showed
the hunters all going round the copse, while at the same moment, away
with winged steps bounded her companion, flying headlong like the wind,
so as to meet the hunt.
‘Ask me not what the lady feels,
Left in that dreadful hour alone,’
laughed Albinia to herself. ‘Well done, speed! Edmund might be satisfied
there’s not much amiss! Through the hedge--over the meadow--a flying
leap over the stream--it is more like a bird than a man--up again. Does
he mean to follow the hunt all the rest of the way? Rather Irish, I must
say! And I do believe they will all come down this lane! I must walk on;
it wont do to be overtaken here between these high hedges. Ah! I thought
he was too much of a gentleman to leave me--here he comes. How much in
his way I must be! I never saw such a runner; not a bit does he slacken
for the hill--and what bright cheeks and eyes! What good it must have
done him!’
‘I beg ten thousand pardons!’ cried he, as he came up, scarcely out of
breath. ‘I declare I forgot you, I could not help it, when I saw them at
a check!’
‘You feel for the hunter as I do for the fox,’ said Albinia. ‘Is yours
one of the great hunting neighbourhoods?’
‘That it is!’ he cried. ‘My grandfather had the grand stud! He and his
seven sons were out three times in the week, and there was a mount for
whoever wanted it!’
‘And this generation is not behind the last?’
‘Ah! and why would it be?’ exclaimed the boy, the last remnant of
English pronunciation forsaking him. ‘My Uncle Connel has the best mare
on this side the bridge of Athlone! I mean that side.’
‘And how is it with you?’ asked Albinia.
‘We’ve got no horses--that is, except my father’s mare, and the colt,
and Fir Darrig--the swish-tailed pony--and the blind donkey that brings
in the turf. So we younger ones mostly go hunting on foot; and after all
I believe that’s the best sport. Bryan always comes in before any of the
horses, and we all think it a shame if we don’t!’
‘I see where you learnt the swiftness of foot that was so useful last
July,’ said Albinia.
‘That? oh! but Bryan would have been up long before me,’ said Ulick.
‘He’d have made for the lock, not the gate! You should see what sport
we have when the fox takes to the Corrig Dearg up among the rocks--and
little Rosie upon Fir Darrig, with her hair upon the wind, and her
colour like the morning cloud, glancing in and out among the rocks like
the fairy of the glen. There are those that think her the best part of
the hunt; they say the English officers at Ochlochtimore would never
think it worth coming out but for her. I don’t believe that, you know,’
he added, laughing, ‘though I like to fetch a rise out of Ulick at the
great house by telling him of it.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Fifteen last April, and she is like an April wind, when it comes warm
and frolicking over the sea! So wild and free, and yet so gentle and
soft! Ellen and Mary are grave and steady, and work hard--every stitch
of my stockings was poor Mary’s knitting, except what poor old Peggy
would send up for a compliment; but Rosie--I don’t think she does a
thing but sing, and ride, and row the boat, and keep the house alive! My
mother shakes her head, but I don’t know what she’ll say when she gets
my aunt’s letter. My Aunt Goldsmith purses up her lips, and says, “I’ll
write to advise my sister to send her daughters to some good school.”
Ellen, maybe, might bear one, but ah! the thought of little Rosie in a
good school!’
‘Like her brother Ulick in a good bank, eh?’
‘Why,’ he cried, ‘they always called me the steady Englishman!’
Albinia laughed, but at that moment the sounds of the hunt again
occupied them, and all were interpreted by Ulick with the keenest
interest, but he would not run away again, though she exhorted him not
to regard her. Presently it swept on out of hearing, and by-and-bye
they reached the summit of the hill, and looked forth on the dark pine
plantations on the opposite undulation, standing out in black relief
against a sky golden with a pale, pure, pearly November sunset, a
‘daffodil sky’ flecked with tiny fleeces of soft bright-yellow light,
reminding Albinia of Fouque’s beautiful dream of Aslauga’s golden hair
showing the gates of Heaven to her devoted knight. She looked for her
companion’s sympathy in her admiration, but the woods seemed to oppress
him, and his panting sigh showed how real a thing was _he-men_.
‘Oh! my poor sun!’ he broke out, ‘I pity you for having to go down
before your time into these black, stifling woods that rise up to
smother you like giants--and not into your own broad, cool Atlantic,
laughing up your own sparkles of light.’
‘We inland people can hardly appreciate your longing for space.’
‘It’s a very prison,’ said Ulick; ‘the horizon is choked all round, and
one can’t breathe in these staid stiff hedges and enclosures!’ And he
threw out his arms and flapped them over his breast with a gesture of
constraint.
‘You seem no friend to cultivation.’
‘Why, your meadows would be pretty things if they were a little
greener,’ said Ulick; ‘but one gets tired of them, and of those straight
lines of ploughed field. There’s no sense of liberty; it is like the man
whose prison walls closed in upon him!’ And he gave another weary sigh,
his step lost elasticity, and he moved on heavily.
‘You are tired; I have brought you too far.’
‘Tired by a bit of a step like this?’ cried the boy, disdainfully, as he
straightened himself, and resumed his brisk tread. But it did not last.
‘I had forgotten that you had not been well,’ she said.
‘Pshaw!’ muttered Ulick; then resumed, ‘Aye, Mr. Kendal brought in the
doctor upon me--very kind of him--but I do assure you ‘tis nothing but
home sickness; I was nearly as bad when I went to St. Columba, but I got
over it then, and I will again!’
‘It may be so in part,’ said Albinia, kindly; ‘but let me be
impertinent, Ulick, for my sister Winifred told me to look after you;
surely you give it every provocation. Such a change of habits is enough
to make any one ill. Should you not ask your uncle for a holiday, and go
home for a little while?’
‘Don’t name it, I beg of you,’ cried the poor lad in an agitated voice,
‘it would only bring it all over again! I’ve promised my mother to do
my part, and with His help I _will_! Let the columns run out to all
eternity, and the figures crook themselves as spitefully as they
will, I’ve vowed to myself not to stir till I’ve got the better of the
villains!’
‘Ah!’ said Albinia, ‘they have blackened your eyes like the bruises of
material antagonists! Yes, it is a gallant battle, but indeed you must
give yourself all the help you can, for it would be doing your mother no
good to fall ill.’
‘I’ve no fears,’ said Ulick; ‘I know very well what is the matter with
me, and that if I don’t give way, it will go off in time. You’ve given
it a good shove with your kindness, Mrs. Kendal,’ he added, with deep
emotion in his sensitive voice; ‘only you must not talk of my going
home, or you’ll undo all you have done.’
‘Then I won’t; we must try to make you a home here. And in the first
place, those lodgings of yours; you can never be comfortable in them.’
‘Ah! you saw my fire smoking. I never shall learn to make a coal fire
burn.’
‘Not only that,’ said Albinia, ‘but you might easily find rooms much
better furnished, and fitter for you.’
‘I do assure you,’ exclaimed Ulick, ‘you scarcely saw it! Why, I don’t
think there’s a room at the big house in better order, or so good!’
‘At least,’ said Albinia, repressing her deduction as to the big house
of Ballymakilty, ‘you have no particular love for the locality--the
river smell--the stock of good leather, &c.’
‘It’s all Bayford and town smell together,’ said Ulick; ‘I never thought
one part worse than another, begging your pardon, Mrs. Kendal.’
‘And I am sure,’ she continued, ‘that woman can never make your meals
comfortable. Yes, I see I am right, and I assure you hard head-work
needs good living, and you will never be a match for the rogues in black
and white without good beef-steaks. Now confess whether she gives you
dinners of old shoe-leather.’
‘A man can’t sit down to dinner by himself,’ cried Ulick, impatiently.
‘Tea with a book are all that is bearable.’
‘And you never go out--never see any one.’
‘I dine at my uncle’s every Sunday,’ said Ulick.
‘Is that all the variety you have?’
‘Why, my uncle told me he would not have me getting into what he calls
idle company. I’ve dined once at the vicarage, and drunk tea twice with
Mr. Hope, but it is no use thinking of it--I couldn’t afford it, and
that’s the truth.’
‘Have you any books? What can you find to do all the evening?’
‘I have a few that bear reading pretty often, and Mr. Hope as lent
me some. I’ve been trying to keep up my Greek, and then I do believe
there’s some way of simplifying those accounts by logarithms, if I could
but work it out. But my mother told me to walk, and I assure you I do
take a constitutional as soon as I come out at half-past four every
day.’
‘Well, I have designs, and mind you don’t traverse them, or I shall have
to report you at home. I have a lodging in my eye for you, away from the
river, and a nice clean, tidy Irishwoman to keep you in order, make your
fires, and cram you, if you wont eat, and see if she does not make a man
of you--’
‘Stop, stop, Mrs. Kendal!’ cried Ulick, distressed. ‘You are very kind,
but it can’t be.’
‘Excuse me, it is economy of the wrong sort to live in a gutter, and
catch agues and fevers. Only think, if it was my boy Gilbert, should I
not be obliged to any one that would tyrannize over him for his good!
Besides, what I propose is not at all beyond such means as Mr. Kendal
tells me are the least Mr. Goldsmith ought to give you. Do you dislike
going into particulars with me? You know I am used to think for Gilbert,
and I am a sort of cousin.’
‘You are kindness itself,’ said Ulick; ‘and there! I suppose I must go
to the bottom of it, and it is no news that pence are not plenty among
the O’Mores, though it is no fault of my uncle. See there what my poor
dear mother says.’
He drew a letter from his pocket, and gave a page to her.
‘I miss you sorely, my boy,’ it said; ‘I know the more what a support
and friend you have been to me now that you are so far away; but all
is made up to me in knowing you to be among my own people, and the
instrument of reconciliation with my brother, as you well know how
great has been the pain of the estrangement caused by my own pride and
wilfulness. I cannot tell you how glad I am that he approves of you,
and that you are beginning to get used to the work that was my own
poor father’s for so long. Bred up as you have been, my mountain lad, I
scarcely dared to hope that you would be able to sit down quietly to it,
with all our hopes of making you a scholar so suddenly frustrated; but I
might have put faith in your loving heart and sense of duty to carry
you through anything. I feel as if a load were off my mind since you and
Bryan are so happily launched. The boy has not once applied for money
since he joined; and if you write to him, pray beg him to be careful,
for it would well-nigh drive your father mad to be pressed any more--the
poor mare has been sold at a dead loss and the Carrick-humbug quarry
company pays no dividends, so how we are to meet the Christmas bills I
cannot guess. But, as you remember, we have won over worse times, and
now Providence has been so good to you and Bryan, what have I to do but
be thankful and hope the best.’
Ulick watched her face, and gave her another note, saying mournfully,
‘You see they all, but my mother, think, that if I am dragging our
family honour through the mire, I’ve got something by it. Poor Bryan, he
knows no better--he’s younger than me by two years.’
The young ensign made a piteous confession of the first debt he had been
able to contract, for twenty pounds, with a promise that if his brother
would help him out of this one scrape, he would never run into another.
‘I am very sorry for you, Ulick,’ said Albinia, ‘and I hate to advise
you to be selfish, but it really is quite impossible for you to be
paymaster for all your brothers’ debts.’
‘If it were Connel, I know it would be of no use,’ said Ulick. ‘But
Bryan--you see he has got a start--they gave him a commission, and he is
the finest fellow of us all, and knows what his word is, and keeps it!
Maybe, if I get on, I may be able to save, and help him to his next
step, and then if Redmond could get to college, my mother would be a
happy woman, and all thanks to my uncle.’
‘Then it is this twenty pounds that is pinching you now? Is that it?’
‘You see my uncle said he would give me enough to keep me as a gentleman
and his nephew, but not enough to keep all the family, as he said. After
my Christmas quarter I shall be up in the world again, and then there
will be time to think of the woman you spoke of--a Connaught woman, did
you say?’
When Albinia reported this dialogue to her husband, he was much moved by
this simple self-abnegation.
‘There is nothing for it,’ he said, ‘but to bring him here till
Christmas, and by that time we will take care that the new lodgings are
cheap enough for him. He must not be left to the mercy of old Goldsmith
and his sister!’
Even Albinia was astonished, but Mr. Kendal carried out his intentions,
and went in quest of his new friend; while no one thought of objecting
except grandmamma.
‘I suppose, my dear,’ she said, ‘that you know what Mr. Goldsmith means
to do for this young man.’
‘I am sure I don’t,’ said Albinia.
‘Really! Ah! well, I’m an old woman, and I may be wrong, but my poor
dear Mr. Meadows would never encourage a banker’s clerk about the house
unless he knew what were his expectations. Irish too! If there was a
thing Mr. Meadows disliked more than another, it was an Irishman! He
said they were all adventurers.’
However, Ulick’s first evening at Willow Lawn was on what he called ‘a
headache day.’ He could not have taken a better measure for overcoming
grandmamma’s objections. Poor dear Mr. Meadows’ worldly wisdom was not
sufficiently native to her to withstand the sight of anything so pale
and suffering, especially as he did not rebel against answering her
close examination, which concluded in her pronouncing these intermitting
attacks to be agueish, and prescribing quinine. To take medicines is an
effectual way of gaining an old lady’s love. Ulick was soon established
in her mind as ‘a very pretty behaved young gentleman.’
In the evenings, when Mr. Kendal read aloud, Ulick listened, and enjoyed
it from the corner where he sheltered his eyes from the light. He was
told that he ought to go to bed quickly, but after the ladies were
in their rooms, a long buzzing murmur was heard in the passage, and
judicious peeping revealed the two gentlemen, each, candle in hand, the
one with his back against the wall at the top of the stairs, the other
leaning upon the balusters three steps below, and there they stayed,
till the clock struck one, and Ulick’s candle burnt out.
‘What could you be talking about?’ asked the aggrieved Albinia.
‘Prometheus Vinctus,’ composedly returned Mr. Kendal.
Ulick’s eagerness in collecting every crumb of scholarship was a
great bond of union; but there was still more in the bright, open,
demonstrative nature of the youth, which had a great attraction for the
reserved, serious Mr. Kendal, and scarcely a day had passed before they
were on terms of intimacy, almost like an elder and younger brother.
Admitted into the family as a connexion, Ulick at once viewed the girls
as cousins, and treated them with the same easy grace of good-natured
familiarity as if they had been any of the nineteen Miss O’Mores around
Ballymakilty.
‘How is your head now?’ asked Mr. Kendal. ‘You are late this evening.’
‘Yes,’ said Ulick, entering the drawing-room, which was ruddy with
firelight, and fragrant with the breath of the conservatory, and leaning
over an arm-chair, as he tried to rub the aching out of his brow; ‘there
were some accounts to finish up and my additions came out different
every time.’
‘A sure sign that you ought to have left off.’
‘I was just going to have told my uncle I was good for nothing to-day,
when I heard old Johns mumbling something to him about Mr. More being
unwell, and looking up, I saw that cold grey eye twinkling at me, as
much as to say he was proud to see how soon an Irishman could be beaten.
So what could I do but give him look for look, and go on with eight and
seven, and five and two, as unconcerned as he was.’
‘Well,’ said Mr. Kendal, ‘you know I think that your uncle’s apparent
indifference may be his fashion of being your best friend.’
‘I’d take it like sunshine in May from a stranger, and be proud to
disappoint him,’ said Ulick, ‘but to call himself my uncle, and use
my mother’s own eyes to look at me that way, that’s the stroke! and to
think that I’m only striving to harden myself by force of habit to be
exactly like him! I’d rather enlist to-morrow, if that would not be his
greatest triumph!’ he cried, pressing his hands hard on his temple. ‘It
is very childish, but I could forgive him anything but using my mother’s
eyes that way!’
‘You will yet rejoice in the likeness,’ said Mr. Kendal. ‘You must
believe in more than you can trace, and when your perseverance has
conquered his esteem, the rest will follow.’
‘Follow? The rest, as you call it, would go before at home,’ sighed
Ulick, wearily. ‘Esteem is like fame! what I want begins without it, and
lives as well with or without it!’
‘Perhaps,’ said his friend, ‘Mr. Goldsmith would think it weakness to
show preference to a relation before it was earned.’
‘Ah then,’ cried Ulick, in a quaint Irish tone, ‘Heaven have mercy on
the little children!’
‘Yes, the doctrine can only be consistently held by a solitary man.’
‘Where would we be but for inconsistency?’ exclaimed Ulick.
‘I do not like to hear you talk in that manner,’ said Sophy.
‘Inconsistency is mere weakness.’
‘Ah! then you are the dangerous character,’ said Ulick, with a droll
gesture of sheltering himself behind the chair.
‘I did not call myself consistent, I wish I were,’ she said, gravely.
‘How she must love the French!’ returned Ulick, confidentially turning
to her father.
‘Not at all, I detest them.’
‘Then you are inconsistent, for they’re the very models of
uncompromising consistency.’
‘Yes, to bad principles,’ said Sophy.
‘Robespierre was a prime specimen of consistency to good principle!’
Sophy turned to her father, and with an odd dubious look, asked him, ‘Is
be teasing me?’
‘He’d be proud to have the honour,’ Ulick made answer, so that Mr.
Kendal’s smile grew broad. It was the funniest thing to see Ulick
sporting with Sophy’s gravity, constraining her to playfulness, with
something of the compulsion exercised by a large frolicsome puppy upon a
sober old dog of less size and strength.
‘I do not like to see powers wasted on paradox,’ she said, even as the
grave senior might roll up his lip and snarl.
‘I’m in earnest, Sophy,’ pursued Ulick, changing his note to eagerness.
‘La grande nation herself finds that logic was her bane. Consistency was
never made for man! Why where would this world be if it did not go two
ways at once?’
Sophy did laugh at this Irish version of the centripetal and centrifugal
forces, but she held out. ‘The earth describes a circle; I like straight
lines.’
‘Much we shall have of the right direction, unless we are content to
turn right about face,’ said Ulick. ‘The best path of life is but a
herring-bone pattern.’
‘What does he know of herring-boning?’ asked Mrs. Kendal, coming in at
the moment, with a white cashmere cloak folded picturesquely over her
delicate blue silk. Ulick in a moment assumed a less careless attitude,
as he answered--
‘I found my poetical illustration on the motion of the earth too much
for her, so I descended to the herring-bone as more suited to her
capacity.’
‘There he is, mamma,’ said Sophy, ‘pleading that consistency is the most
ruinous thing in the world.’
‘I thought as much,’ said Albinia. ‘Prometheus and his kin do most
abound when Ulick’s head is worst, and papa is in greatest danger of
being late.’
Mr. Kendal turned round, looked at the time-piece, and marched off.
‘But mamma!’ continued Sophy, driving straight at her point, ‘what do
you think of consistency?’
‘Oh, mamma!’ cried Lucy, coming into the room in a flutter of white;
‘there you are in your beautiful blue! Have you really put it on for the
Drurys?’
Sophy bit her lip, neither pleased at the interruption, nor at the
taste.
‘Have you a graduated scale of dresses for all your friends, Lucy? asked
Ulick.
‘Everybody has, I suppose,’ said Lucy.
‘Ah! then I shall know how to judge how I stand in your favour. I never
knew so well what the garb of friendship meant.’
‘You must know which way her scale goes,’ said Albinia, laughing at
Sophy’s evident affront at the frivolous turn the conversation had
taken.
‘That needs no asking,’ quoth Ulick, ‘Unadorned, adorned the most for
the nearest the hearth.’
‘That’s all conceit,’ said Lucy. ‘Maybe familiarity breeds contempt.’
‘No, no, when young ladies despise, they use a precision that says,
“‘Tis myself I care for, and not you.”’
‘What an observer!’ cried Lucy. ‘Now then, interpret my dress to-night!’
‘How can you, Lucy!’ muttered the scandalized Sophy.
‘Well, Sophy, as you will have him to torment with philosophy this
whole evening, I think you might give him a little respite,’ said Lucy,
good-humouredly. ‘I want to know what my dress reveals to him!’ and
drawing up her head, where two coral pins contrasted with her dark
braids, and spreading out her full white skirts and cerise trimmings,
she threw her figure into an attitude, and darted a merry challenge from
her lively black eyes, while Ulick availed himself of the permission to
look critically, and Sophy sank back disgusted.
‘Miss Kendal can, when she is inclined, produce as much effect with her
beams of the second order as with all her splendours displayed.’
‘Stuff,’ said Lucy.
‘Stuff indeed,’ more sincerely murmured Sophy.
‘Say something in earnest,’ said Lucy. ‘You professed to tell what I
thought of the people.’
‘I hope you’ll never put on such new white gloves where I’m the party
chiefly concerned.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They are a great deal too unexceptionable.’
If there were something coquettish in the manner of these two, it did
not give Albinia much concern. It was in him ‘only Irish;’ and Fred
Ferrars had made her believe that it was rather a sign of the absence of
love than of its presence. She saw much more respect and interest in his
mischievous attacks on Sophy’s gravity, and though Lucy both pitied him
and liked chattering with him, it was all the while under the secret
protest that he was only a banker’s clerk.
Sophy was glad of the presence of a third person to obviate the perils
of her evenings with grandmamma, and she beheld the trio set off to
their dinner-party, without the usual dread of being betrayed into
wrangling. Mr. O’More devoted himself to the old lady’s entertainment,
he amused her with droll stories, and played backgammon with her. Then
she composed herself to her knitting, and desired them not to mind her,
she liked to hear young people talk cheerfully; whereupon Sophy, by way
of light and cheerful conversation, renewed the battle of consistency
with a whole broadside of heavy metal.
When the diners-out came home, they found the war raging as hotly as
ever; a great many historical facts and wise sayings having been fired
off on both sides, and neither having found out that each meant the same
thing.
However, the hours had gone imperceptibly past them, which could not
be said for the others. The half-yearly dinners at Mr. Drury’s were
Albinia’s dread nearly as much as Mr. Kendal’s aversion. He was certain,
whatever he might intend, to fall into a fit of absence, and she was
almost equally sure to hear something unpleasant, and to regret her own
reply. On the whole, however, Mr. Kendal came away on this evening
the least dissatisfied, for Mr. Goldsmith had asked him with some
solicitude, whether he thought ‘that lad, young More,’ positively
unwell; and had gone the length of expressing that he seemed to be
fairly sharp, and stuck to his work. Mr. Kendal seized the moment for
telling his opinion, of Ulick, and though Mr. Goldsmith coughed and
looked dry and almost contemptuous, he was perceptibly gratified, and
replied with a maxim evidently intended both as an excuse for himself
and as a warning to the Kendals, that young men were always spoilt by
being made too much of--in his younger days--&c.
Lucy, meantime, was undergoing the broad banter of her unrefined
cousins on the subject of the Irish clerk. A very little grace in the
perpetration would have made it grateful to her vanity, but this was far
too broad raillery, and made her hold up her head with protestations of
her perfect indifference, to which her cousins manifested incredulity,
visiting on her with some petty spite their small jealousies of her
higher pretensions, and of the attention which had been paid to her by
Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy.
‘Not that he will ever look at you again, Lucy, you need not flatter
yourself,’ said the amiable Sarah Anne. ‘Harry Wolfe writes that he was
flirting with a beautiful young lady who came to see Oxford, and that he
is spending quantities of money.’
‘It is nothing to me, I am sure,’ retorted Lucy. ‘Besides, Gilbert says
no such thing.’
‘Gilbert! oh, no!’ exclaimed Miss Drury; ‘why, he is just as bad
himself. Papa said, from what Mrs. Wolfe told him, he would not take 500
pounds to pay Mr. Gilbert’s bills.’
Albinia had been hearing much the same story from Mrs. Drury, though not
so much exaggerated, and administered with more condolence. She did not
absolutely believe, and yet she could not utterly disbelieve, so the
result was a letter to Gilbert, with an anxious exhortation to be
careful, and not to be deluded into foolish expenditure in imitation of
the Polysyllable; and as no special answer was returned, she dismissed
the whole from her mind as a Drury allegation.
The horse chanced to be lame, so that Gilbert could not be met at
Hadminster on his return from Oxford, but much earlier than the omnibus
usually lumbered into Bayford, he astonished Sophy, who was lying on the
sofa in the morning-room, by marching in with a free and easy step, and
a loose coat of the most novel device.
‘No one else at home?’ he asked.
‘Only grandmamma. We did not think the omnibus would come in so soon,
but I suppose you took a fly, as there were three of you.’
‘As if we were going to stand six miles of bus with the Wolfe cub!
No, Dusautoy brought his horse down with him, and I took a fly!’ said
Gilbert. ‘Well, and what’s the matter with Captain; has the Irishman
been riding him?’
Sophy bit her lip to prevent an angry answer, and was glad that Maurice
rushed in, fall of uproarious joy. ‘Hollo! boy, how you grow! What have
you got there?’
‘It’s my new pop-gun, that Ulick made me, I’ll shoot you,’ cried
Maurice, retiring to a suitable distance.
‘I declare the child has caught the brogue! Is the fellow here still?’
‘What fellow?’ coldly asked Sophy.
‘Why, this pet of my father’s.’
‘Bang!’ cried Maurice, and a pellet passed perilously close to Gilbert’s
eyes.
‘Don’t, child. Pray is this banker’s clerk one of our fixtures, Sophy?’
‘I don’t know why you despise him, unless it is because it is what you
ought to be yourself,’ Sophy was provoked into retorting.
‘Apparently my father has a monomania for the article.’ Gilbert intended
to speak with provoking coolness; but another fraternal pellet hit him
fall in the nose, and the accompanying shout of glee was too much for
an already irritated temper. With passion most unusual in him, he caught
hold of the child, and exclaiming, ‘You little imp, what do you mean
by it?’ he wrenched the weapon out of his hand, and dashed it into
the fire, in the midst of an energetic ‘For shame!’ from his sister.
Maurice, with a furious ‘Naughty Gilbert,’ struck at him with both his
little fists clenched, and then precipitated himself over the fender
to snatch his treasure from the grate, but was instantly captured and
pulled back, struggling, kicking, and fighting with all his might, till,
to the equal relief of both brothers, Sophy held up the pop-gun in
the tongs, one end still tinged with a red glow, smoky, blackened, and
perfumed. Maurice made one bound, she lowered it into his grasp as the
last red spark died out, and he clasped it as Siegfried did the magic
sword!
‘There, Maurice, I didn’t mean it,’ said Gilbert, heartily ashamed and
sorry; ‘kiss and make it up, and then put on your hat, and we’ll come up
to old Smith’s and get such a jolly one!’
The forgiving child had already given the kiss, glad to atone for his
aggressions, but then was absorbed in rubbing the charred wood, amazed
that while so much black came off on his fingers, the effect on the
weapon was not proportionate, and then tried another shot in a safer
direction. ‘Come,’ said Gilbert, ‘put that black affair into the fire,
and come along.’
‘No!’ said Maurice; ‘it is my dear gun that Ulick made me, and it shan’t
be burnt.’
‘What, not if I give you a famous one--like a real one, with a stock
and barrel?’ said Gilbert, anxious to be freed from the tokens of his
ebullition.
‘No! no!’ still stoutly said the constant Maurice. ‘I don’t want new
guns; I’ve got my dear old one, and I’ll keep him to the end of his days
and mine!’ and he crossed his arms over it.
‘That’s right, Maurice,’ said Sophy; ‘stick to old friends that have
borne wounds in your service!’
‘Well, it’s his concern if he likes such a trumpery old thing,’ said
Gilbert. ‘Come here, boy; you don’t bear malice! Come and have a ride on
my back.’
The practical lesson, ‘don’t shoot at your brother’s nose,’ would never
have been impressed, had not mamma, on coming in, found Maurice and
his pop-gun nearly equally black, and by gradual unfolding of cause
and effect, learnt his forgotten offence. She reminded him of ancient
promises never to aim at human creatures, assured him that Gilbert was
very kind not to have burnt it outright; and to the great displeasure,
and temporary relief of all the family, sequestrated the weapon for the
rest of the evening.
Sophy told her in confidence that Gilbert had been the most to blame,
which she took as merely an instance of Sophy’s blindness to Maurice’s
errors; for the explosion had so completely worked off the Oxford dash,
that he was perfectly meek and amiable. Considering the antecedents,
such a contrast to himself as young O’More could hardly fail to be an
eyesore, walking tame about the home, and specially recommended to
his friendship; but so good-natured was he, and so attractive was the
Irishman, that it took much influence from Algernon Dusautoy to keep
up a thriving aversion. Albinia marvelled at the power exercised over
Gilbert by one whose intellect and pretensions he openly contemned, but
perceived that obstinacy and undoubting self-satisfaction overmastered
his superior intelligence and principle, and that while perceiving all
the follies of the Polysyllable, Gilbert had a strange propensity for
his company, and therein always resumed the fast man, disdainful of the
clerk. He did not like Ulick better for being the immediate cause of the
removal of the last traces of the Belmarche family from their old abode,
which had been renovated by pretty shamrock chintz furniture, the pride
of the two Irish hearts. Indeed it was to be feared that Bridget
would assist in the perpetuation of those rolling R’s which caused Mr.
Goldsmith’s brow to contract whenever his nephew careered along upon
one.
His departure from Willow Lawn was to take place at Christmas. The
Ferrars party were coming to keep the two consecutive birthdays of
Sophy and Maurice at Bayford, would take him back for Christmas-day to
Fairmead, and on his return he would take possession of his new rooms.
Maurice’s fete was to serve as the occasion of paying off civilities
to a miscellaneous young party; but as grandmamma’s feelings would have
been hurt, had not Sophy’s been equally distinguished, it was arranged
that Mrs. Nugent should then bring her eldest girl to meet the Ferrarses
at an early tea.
Just as Albinia had descended to await her guests, Gilbert came down,
and presently said, with would-be indifference, ‘Oh, by-the-by, Dusautoy
said he would look in.’
‘The Polysyllable!’ cried Albinia, thunderstruck; ‘what possessed you to
ask him, when you knew I sacrificed Mr. Dusautoy rather than have him to
spoil it all?’
‘I didn’t ask him exactly,’ replied Gilbert; ‘it was old Bowles, who met
us, and tried to nail us to eat our mutton with him, as he called it. I
had my answer, and Dusautoy got off by saying he was engaged to us, and
desired me to tell you he would make his excuses in person.’
‘He can make no excuse for downright falsehood.’
‘Hem!’ quoth Gilbert. ‘You wouldn’t have him done into drinking old
Bowles’s surgery champagne.’
‘One comfort is that he wont get any dinner,’ said Albinia,
vindictively. ‘I hope he’ll be ravenously hungry.’
‘He may not come after all,’ said Gilbert; and Albinia, laying hold of
that hope, had nearly forgotten the threatened disaster, as her party
appeared by instalments, and Winifred owned to her that Sophy had grown
better-looking than could have been expected. Her eyes had brightened,
the cloudy brown of her cheeks was enlivened, she held herself better,
and the less childish dress was much to her advantage. But above all,
the moody look of suffering was gone, and her face had something of the
grave sweetness and regular beauty of that of her father.
‘Seventeen,’ said Mrs. Ferrars; ‘by the time she is seventy, she may be
a remarkably handsome woman!’
The tea-drinking was in lively operation, when after a thundering
knock, Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy was ushered in, with the air of a prince
honouring the banquet of his vassals, saying, ‘I told Kendal I should
presume on your hospitality, I beg you will make no difference on my
account.’
Of which gracious permission Albinia was resolved to avail herself. She
left all the insincerity to her husband, and would by no means allow
grandmamma to abdicate the warm corner. She suspected that he wanted
an introduction to Mrs. Nugent, and was resolved to defeat this object,
unless he should condescend to make the request, so she was well
satisfied to see him wedged in between papa and Sophy, while a
prodigious quantity of Irish talk was going on between Mrs. Nugent and
Mr. O’More, with contributions of satire from Mr. Ferrars which kept
every one laughing except little Nora Nugent and Mary Ferrars, who were
deep in the preliminaries of an eternal friendship, and held the ends
of each other’s crackers like a pair of doves. Lucy, however, was ill at
ease at the obscurity which shrouded the illustrious guest, and in her
anxiety, gave so little attention to her two neighbours, that Willie
Ferrars, affronted at some neglect, exclaimed, ‘Why, Lucy, what makes
you screw your eyes about so! you can’t attend to any one.’
‘It is because Polly Silly is there,’ shouted Master Maurice from his
throne beside his mamma.
To the infinite relief of the half-choked Albinia, little Mary Ferrars,
with whom her cousin had been carrying on a direful warfare all day,
fitted on the cap, shook her head gravely at him, and after an appealing
look of indignation, first at his mamma, then at her own, was overheard
confiding to Nora Nugent that Maurice was a very naughty boy--she was
sorry to say, a regular spoilt child.
‘But how should you hinder Miss Kendal from attending?’
‘I’ll tell you, darling. Poor Lucy! she is very fond of me, and I dare
say she wanted me to sit next to her, but you know she will have me for
three days, and I have you only this one evening. I’ll go and speak
to her after tea, when we go into the drawing-room, and then she wont
mind.’
Lucy, after an agony of blushes, had somewhat recovered on finding that
no one seemed to apply her brother’s speech, and when the benevolent
Mary made her way to her, and thrust a hand into hers, only a feeble
pressure replied to these romantic blandishments, so anxious was she
to carry to Mrs. Kendal the information that Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy
had been so obliging as to desire his servant to bring his guitar and
key-bugle.
‘We are much obliged,’ said Albinia, ‘but look at that face!’ and she
turned Lucy towards Willie’s open-mouthed, dismayed countenance. You
must tell him the company are not sufficiently advanced in musical
science.’
‘But mamma, it would gratify him!’
‘Very likely’--and without listening further, Albinia turned to Willie,
who had all day been insisting that papa should introduce her to the new
game of the Showman.
Infinitely delighted to be relieved from the fear of the guitar, Willie
hunted all who would play into another room; whence they were to be
summoned, one by one, back to the drawing-room by the showman, Mr.
Ferrars, who shrugged his shoulders at the task, but undertook it, and
first called for Mrs. Kendal.
She found him stationed before the red curtains, which were closely
drawn, and her husband and the three elder ladies sitting by as
audience.
‘Pray, madam, may I ask what animal you would desire to have exhibited
to you, out of the vast resources that my menagerie contains. Choose
freely, I undertake that whatever you may select, you shall not be
disappointed.’
‘What, not if I were to ask for a black spider monkey?’ said Albinia, to
whom it was very charming to be playing with Maurice again.
Mr. Kendal looked up in entertained curiosity, Mrs. Nugent smiled as if
she thought the showman’s task impossible, and Winifred stretched out to
gain a full view.
‘A black spider monkey,’ he said, slowly. ‘Allow me to ask, madam, if
you are acquainted with the character of the beast?’
‘It doesn’t scratch, does it?’ said she, quickly.
‘That is for you to answer.’
‘I never knew it do so. It does chatter a great deal, but it never
scratched that I knew of.’
‘Nor I,’ said the showman, ‘since it was young. Do you think age renders
it graver and steadier?’
‘Not a bit. It is always frisky and troublesome, and I never knew it get
a bit better as it grew older.’
Winifred laughed outright. Mr. Kendal’s lips were parted by his smile.
‘I wonder what sort of a mother it would make?’ said the showman.
‘All animals are good mothers, of course.’
‘I meant, is it a good disciplinarian?’
‘If you mean cuffing its young one for playing exactly the same tricks
as itself.’
‘Exactly; and what would be the effect of letting it and its young one
loose in a great scholar’s study?’
‘There wouldn’t be much study left.’
‘And would it be for his good?’
‘Really, Mr. Showman, you ask very odd questions. Shall we try?’ said
Albinia, with a skip backward, so as to lay her hand on the shoulder
of her own great scholar, while the showman drew back the curtain,
observing--‘I wish, ma’am, I could show “it and its young one” together,
but the young specimen is unfortunately asleep. Behold the original
black spider monkey!’
There stood the monkey, with sunny brown locks round the laughing
glowing face, and one white paw still lying on the scholar’s
shoulder--while his face made no assurance needful that it was very good
for him! The mirror concealed behind the curtains was the menagerie!
Albinia clapped her hands with delight, and pronounced it the most
perfect of games.
‘And now let us have Willie,’ said Mrs. Ferrars; ‘it will conduce to the
harmony of the next room.’
Willie, already initiated, hoped to puzzle papa as a platypus
ornithoryncus, but was driven to allow that it was a nondescript animal,
neither fish, flesh, nor good red-herring, useless, and very fond of
grubbing in the mud; and if it were not at Botany Bay, it ought to
be! The laughter that hailed his defence of its nose as ‘well, nothing
particular,’ precipitated the drawing up of the curtain and his
apparition in the glass: and then Nora Nugent being called, the
inseparable Mary accompanied her, arm-in-arm, simpering an announcement
that they liked nothing so well as a pair of dear little love-birds.
Oh, unpitying papa! to draw from the unsuspicious Nora the admission
that they were very dull little birds, of no shape at all, who always
sat hunched up in a corner without any fun, and people said their love
was all stupidity and pretence; in fact, if she had one she should call
it Silly Polly or Polly Silly!
To silence Willie’s exultation in his sister’s discomfiture, he was sent
to fetch Lucy, whose impersonation of an argus pheasant would not have
answered well but for a suggestion of Albinia, that she was eyes all
over for any delinquency in school. Ulick O’More, owning with a sigh
that he should like to see no beast better than a snipe, gave rise to
much ingenuity by being led to describe it as of a class migratory,
hard to catch, food for powder, given to long bills. There he guessed
something, and stood on the defensive, but could not deny that its
element was bogs, but that it had been seen skimming over water meadows,
and finding sustenance in banks, whereupon the curtain rose. Ulick
rushed upon the battles of his nation, and was only reduced to
quiescence by the entrance of Sophy, who expressed a desire to see
a coral worm, apparently perplexing the showman, who, to gain time,
hemmed, and said, ‘A very unusual species, ma’am,’ which set all the
younger ones in a double giggle, such as confused Sophy, to find herself
standing up, with every one looking at her, and listening for her words.
‘I thought you undertook for any impossibility in earth air or water.’
‘Well, ma’am, do you take me for a mere mountebank? But when ladies and
gentlemen take such unusual fancies--and for an animal that--you would
not aver that it is often found from home?’
‘Never, I should say.’
‘Nor that it is accessible?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘And why is it so, ma’am?’
‘Why,’ said Sophy, bewildered into forgetting her natural history, ‘it
lives at the bottom of the sea; that’s one thing.’
‘Where Truth lives,’ said a voice behind.
‘I beg to differ,’ observed Albinia. ‘Truth is a fresh water fish at the
bottom of a well; besides, I thought coral worms were always close to
the surface.’
‘But below it--not in everybody’s view,’ said Sophy--an answer which
seemed much to the satisfaction of the audience, but the showman
insisted on knowing why, and whether it did not conceal itself. ‘It
makes stony caves for itself, out of sight,’ said Sophy, almost doubting
whether she spoke correctly. ‘Well, surely it does so.’
‘Most surely,’ said an acclamation so general that she did not like it.
If she had been younger, she would have turned sulky upon the spot, and
Mr. Ferrars almost doubted whether to bring ont his final query. ‘Pray,
ma’am, do you think this creature out of reach in its self-made cave, at
the bottom--no, below the surface of the sea, would be popular enough to
repay the cost of procuring it.’
‘Ah! that’s too bad,’ burst out the Hibernian tones. ‘Why, is not the
best of everything hidden away from the common eye? Out of sight--stony
cave--It is the secret worker that lays the true solid foundation,
raises the new realms, and forms the precious jewels.’ The torrent of
r’s was irresistible!
‘Police! order!’ cried the showman. ‘An Irish mob has got in, and
there’s an end of everything.’ So up went the curtain, and the
polyp appeared, becoming rapidly red coral as she perceived what the
exhibition was, and why the politeness of the Green Isle revolted
from her proclaiming her own unpopularity. But all she did was to turn
gruffly aside, and say, ‘It is lucky there are no more ladies to come,
Mr. Showman, or the mob would turn everything to a compliment.’
Gilbert’s curiosity was directed to the Laughing Jackass, and with too
much truth he admitted that it took its tone from whatever it associated
with, and caught every note, from the song of the lark to the bray of
the donkey; then laughed good-humouredly when the character was fitted
upon himself.
‘That is all, is it not?’ asked the showman. ‘I may retire into private
life.’
‘Oh no,’ cried Willie; ‘you have forgotten Mr. Dusautoy.’
‘I was afraid you had,’ said Lucy, ‘or you could not have left him to
the last.’
‘I am tempted to abdicate,’ said Mr. Ferrars.
‘No,’ Albinia said. ‘He must have his share, and no one but you can do
it. Where can he be? the pause becomes awful!’
‘Willie is making suggestions,’ said Gilbert; ‘his imagination would
never stretch farther than a lion. It’s what he thinks himself and no
mistake.’
‘He is big enough to be the elephant,’ said little Mary.
‘The half-reasoning!’ said Ulick, softly; ‘and I can answer for his
trunk, I saw it come off the omnibus.’
‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you persist in such disorderly conduct, the
exhibition will close,’ cried the showman, waving his wand as Willie
trumpeted Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy in, and on the demand what animal he
wanted to see, twitched him as Flibbertigibbet did the giant warder, and
caused him to respond--‘The Giraffe.’
‘Has it not another name, sir? A short or a long one, more or less
syllables!’
‘Camelopard. A polysyllabic word, certainly,’ said Algernon, looking
with a puzzled expression at the laughers behind; and almost
imagining it possible that he could have made an error, he repeated,
‘Camel-le-o-pard. Yes, it is a polysyllable’--as, indeed, he had added
an unnecessary syllable.
‘Most assuredly,’ said the showman, looking daggers at his suffocating
sister. ‘May I ask you to describe the creature?’
‘Seventeen feet from the crown to the hoof, but falls off behind,’ said
the accurate Mr. Dusautoy; ‘beautiful tawny colour.’
‘Nearly as good as a Lion,’ added Gilbert; but Algernon, fancying the
game was by way of giving useful instruction to the children, went on in
full swing. ‘Handsomely mottled with darker brown; a ruminating animal;
so gentle that in spite of its size, none of my little friends need be
alarmed at its vicinity. Inhabits the African deserts, but may be bred
in more temperate latitudes. I myself saw an individual in the Jardin
des Plantes, which was popularly said never to bend its neck to the
ground, but I consider this a vulgar delusion, for on offering it food,
it mildly inclined its head.’
‘Let us hope the present specimen is equally condescending,’ said Mr.
Ferrars.
‘Eh! what! I see myself!’ said Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy, with a tone so
inappreciably grand in mystification, that the showman had no choice but
to share the universal convulsion of laughter, while Willie rolling on
the floor with ecstasy, shouted, ‘Yes, it is you that are the thing with
such a long name that it can’t bend its head to the ground!’
‘But too good-natured to be annoyed at folly,’ said Mr. Ferrars,
perceiving that it was no sport to him.
‘This is the way my mischievous uncle has served us all in turn,’ said
Lucy, advancing; ‘we have all been shown up, and there was mamma a
monkey, and I an argus pheasant--’
‘Ah! I see,’ said the gentleman. ‘These are your rural pastimes of the
season. Yes, I can take my share in good part, just as I have pelted the
masks at the Carnival.’
‘Even a giraffe can bend his head and do at Rome as Rome does,’
murmured Ulick. But instead of heeding the audacious Irishman, Algernon
patronized the showman by thanks for his exhibition; and then sitting
down by Lucy, asked if he had ever told her of the tricks that he and
il Principe Odorico Moretti used to play at Ems on the old Baron
Sprawlowsky, while Mr. Ferrars, leaning over his sister’s chair, said
aside, ‘I beg your pardon, Albinia; I should not have yielded to Willie.
This “rural pastime” is only in season en famille.’
‘Never mind, it served him right.’
‘It may have served him right, but had we the right to serve him?’
‘I forgive your prudence for the sake of your folly. Could not Oxford
have lessened his pomposity?’
‘It comes too late,’ said Maurice.
Before Ulick went to bed his pen and ink had depicted the entire
caravan. The love-birds were pressed up together, with the individual
features of the two young ladies, and completely little parrots; the
snipe ran along the bars of the cage, looking exactly like all the
O’Mores. The monkey showed nothing but the hands, but one held Maurice,
and the other was clenched as if to cuff him, and grandest of all was,
as in duty bound, Camelopardelis giraffa, thrown somewhat backwards,
with such a majestic form, such a stalking attitude, loftily ruminating
face, and legs so like the Cavendish Dusautoy’s last new pair of
trousers, that Albinia could not help reserving it for the private
delectation of his Aunt Fanny.
‘It and its young one,’ said Mr. Kendal, as he looked at her portrait;
and the name delighted him so much, that he for some time applied it
with a smile whenever his wife gave him cause to remember how much there
was of the monkey in her composition.
It was the merriest Christmas ever known at Willow Lawn, and the first
time there had been anything of the atmosphere of family frolic and fun.
The lighting up of Sophy was one great ingredient; hitherto mirth had
been merely endured by her, whereas now, improved health and spirits
had made her take her share, amuse others and be amused, and cease to
be hurt by the jarring of chance words. Lucy was lively as usual,
but rather more excited than Albinia altogether liked; she was doubly
particular about her dress; more disdainful of the common herd, and
had a general air of exaltation that made Albinia rejoice when the
Polysyllable, the horses, the key-bugle, and genre painting disappeared
from the Bayford horizon.