THE COASTS OF THE GENTILES.
The decayed and disfranchised borough of Calcombe Pomeroy, or
Calcombe-on-the-Sea, is one of the prettiest and quietest little
out-of-the-way watering-places in the whole smiling southern slope
of the county of Devon. Thank heaven, the Great Western Railway,
when planning its organised devastations along the beautiful rural
region of the South Hams, left poor little Calcombe out in the cold;
and the consequence is that those few people who still love to
linger in the uncontaminated rustic England of our wiser forefathers
can here find a beach unspoiled by goat-carriages or black-faced
minstrels, a tiny parade uninvaded by stucco terraces or German
brass bands, and an ancient stone pier off which swimmers may take
a header direct, in the early morning, before the sumptuary edicts
of his worship the Mayor compel them to resort to the use of
bathing-machines and the decent covering of an approved costume,
between the hours of eight and eight. A board beside the mouth of
the harbour, signed by a Secretary of State to his late Majesty
King William the Fourth, still announces to a heedless world the
tolls to be paid for entry by the ships that never arrive; and a
superannuated official in a wooden leg and a gold cap-band retains
the honourable sinecure of a harbour-mastership, with a hypothetical
salary nominally payable from the non-existent fees and port dues.
The little river Cale, at the bottom of whose combe the wee town
nestles snugly, has cut itself a deep valley in the soft sandstone
hills; and the gap in the cliffs formed by its mouth gives room
for the few hundred yards of level on which the antiquated little
parade is warmly ensconced. On either hand tall bluffs of brilliant
red marl raise their honeycombed faces fronting the sea; and in the
distance the sheeny grey rocks of the harder Devonian promontories
gleam like watered satin in the slant rays of the afternoon sun.
Altogether a very sleepy little old-world place is Calcombe Pomeroy,
specially reserved by the overruling chance of the universe to be
a summer retreat for quiet, peace-loving, old-world people.
The Londoner who escapes for a while from the great teeming human
ant-hill, with its dark foggy lanes and solid firmament of hanging
smoke, to draw in a little unadulterated atmosphere at Calcombe
Pomeroy, finds himself landed by the Plymouth slow train at Calcombe
Road Station, twelve miles by cross-country highway from his final
destination. The little grey box, described in the time-tables
as a commodious omnibus, which takes him on for the rest of his
journey, crawls slowly up the first six miles to the summit of
the intervening range at the Cross Foxes Inn, and jolts swiftly
down the other six miles, with red hot drag creaking and groaning
lugubriously, till it seems to topple over sheer into the sea
at the clambering High Street of the old borough. As you turn to
descend the seaward slope at the Cross Foxes, you appear to leave
modern industrial England and the nineteenth century well behind
you on the north, and you go down into a little isolated primaeval
dale, cut off from all the outer world by the high ridge that girds
it round on every side, and turned only on the southern front
towards the open Channel and the backing sun. Half-way down the
steep cobble-paved High Street, just after you pass the big dull
russet church, a small shop on the left-hand side bears a signboard
with the painted legend, 'Oswald, Family Grocer and Provision
Dealer.' In the front bay window of that red-brick house, built
out just over the shop, Harry Oswald, Fellow and Lecturer of Oriel
College, Oxford, kept his big oak writing-desk; and at that desk
he might be seen reading or writing on most mornings during the
long vacation, after the end of his three weeks' stay at a London
West-end lodging-house, from which he had paid his first visit to
Max Schurz's Sunday evening receptions.
'Two pounds of best black tea, good quality--yours is generally
atrocious, Mrs. Oswald--that's the next thing on the list,' said
poor trembling, shaky Miss Luttrell, the Squire's sister, a palsied
old lady with a quavering, querulous, rasping voice. 'Two pounds
of best black tea, and mind you don't send it all dust, as you usually
do. No good tea to be got nowadays, since they took the duties off
and ruined the country. And I see a tall young man lounging about
the place sometimes, and never touching his hat to me as he ought
to do. Young people have no manners in these times, Mrs. Oswald, as
they used to have when you and I were young. Your son, I suppose,
come home from sea or something? He's in the fish-curing line,
isn't he, I think I've heard you say?'
'I don't rightly know who 'ee may mean, Miss Luttrell,' replied
the mother proudly, 'by a young man lounging about the place; but
my son's at home from Oxford at present for his vacations, and he
isn't in the fish-curing line at all, ma'am, but he's a Fellow of
his college, as I've told 'ee more than once already; but you're
getting old, I see, Miss Luttrell, and your memory isn't just what
it had used to be, dost know.'
'Oh, at Oxford, is he?' Miss Luttrell chimed on vacantly, wagging
her wrinkled old head in solemn deprecation of the evil omen. She
knew it as well as Mrs. Oswald herself did, having heard the fact
at least a thousand times before; but she made it a matter of
principle never to encourage these upstart pretensions on the part
of the lower orders, and just to keep them rigorously at their
proper level she always made a feint of forgetting any steps in
advance which they might have been bold enough to take, without
humbly obtaining her previous permission, out of their original
and natural obscurity. 'Fellow of his college is he, really? Fellow
of a college! Dear me, how completely Oxford is going to the dogs.
Admitting all kinds of odd people into the University, I understand.
Why, my second brother--the Archdeacon, you know--was a Fellow of
Magdalen for some time in his younger days. You surprise me, quite.
Fellow of a college! You're perfectly sure he isn't a National
schoolmaster at Oxford instead, and that you and his father haven't
got the two things mixed up together in your heads, Mrs. Oswald?'
'No, ma'am, we'in perfectly sure of it, and we haven't got the
things mixed up in our heads at all, no more nor you have, Miss
Luttrell. He was a scholar of Trinity first, and now he's got
a Fellowship at Oriel. You must mind hearing all about it at the
time, only you're getting so forgetful like now, with years and
such like.' Mrs. Oswald knew there was nothing that annoyed the old
lady so much as any allusion to her increasing age or infirmities,
and she took her revenge out of her in that simple retributive
fashion.
'A scholar of Trinity, was he? Ah, yes, patronage will do a great
deal in these days, for certain. The Rector took a wonderful
interest in your boy, I think, Mrs. Oswald. He went to Plymouth
Grammar School, I remember now, with a nomination no doubt; and
there, I dare say, he attracted some attention, being a decent,
hard-working lad, and got sent to Oxford with a sizarship, or
something of the sort; there are all kinds of arrangements like
that at the Universities, I believe, to encourage poor young men
of respectable character. They become missionaries or ushers in
the end, and often get very good salaries, considering everything,
I'm told.'
'There you're wrong, again, ma'am,' put in Mrs. Oswald, stoutly.
'My husband, he sent Harry to Plymouth School at our own expense;
and after that he got an exhibition from the school, and an open
scholarship, I think they call it, at the college; and he's been no
more beholden to patronage, ma'am, than your brother the Archdeacon
was, nor for the matter o' that not so much neither; for I've a'ways
understood the old Squire sent him first to the Charterhouse, and
afterwards he got a living through Lord Modbury's influence, as
the Squire voted regular with the Modbury people for the borough
and county. But George was always independent, Miss Luttrell, and
beholden to neither Luttrells nor Modburies, and that I tell 'ee
to your face, ma'am, and no shame of it either.'
'Well, well, Mrs. Oswald,' said the old lady, shaking her head more
violently than ever at this direct discomfiture, 'I don't want to
argue with you about the matter. I dare say your son's a very worthy
young man, and has worked his way up into a position he wasn't
intended for by Providence. But it's no business of mine, thank
heaven, it's no business of mine, for I'm not responsible for all
the vagaries of all the tradespeople on my brother's estate, nor
don't want to be. There's Mrs. Figgins, now, the baker's wife; her
daughter has just chosen to get married to a bank clerk in London;
and I said to her this morning, "Well, Mrs. Figgins, so you've let
your Polly go and pick up with some young fellow from town that
you've never seen before, haven't you? And that's the way of all you
people. You marry your girls to bank clerks without a reference, for
the sake of getting 'em off your hands, and what's the consequence?
They rob their employers to keep up a pretty household for their
wives, as if they were fine ladies; and then at last the thing's
discovered, there comes a smash, they run away to America, and you
have your daughters and their children thrown back again penniless
upon your hands." That's what I said to her, Mrs. Oswald. And how's
YOUR daughter, by the way--Jemima I think you call her; how's she,
eh, tell me?'
'I beg your pardon, Miss Luttrell, but her name's not Jemima; it's
Edith.'
'Oh, Edith, is it? Well to be sure! The grand names girls have
dangling about with them nowadays! My name's plain Catherine, and
it's good enough for me, thank goodness. But these young ladies
of the new style must be Ediths and Eleanors and Ophelias, and all
that heathenish kind of thing, as if they were princesses of the
blood or play-actresses, instead of being good Christian Susans
and Janes and Betties, like their grandmothers were before them.
And Miss Edith, now, what is SHE doing?'
'She's doing nothing in particular at this moment, Miss Luttrell,
leastways not so far as I know of; but she's going up to Oxford
part of this term on a visit to her brother.'
'Going up to Oxford, my good woman! Why, heaven bless the girl,
she'd much better stop at home and learn her catechism. She should
try to do her duty in that station of life to which it has pleased
Providence to call her, instead of running after young gentlemen
above her own rank and place in society at Oxford. Tell her so
from me, Mrs. Oswald, and mind you don't send the tea dusty. Two
pounds of your best, if you please, as soon as you can send it.
Good-morning.' And Miss Luttrell, having discovered the absolute
truth of the shocking rumour which had reached her about Edith's
projected visit, the confirmation of which was the sole object of
her colloquy, wagged her way out of the shop again successfully,
and was duly assisted by the page-boy into her shambling little
palsied donkey-chair.
'That was all the old cat came about, you warr'nt you,' muttered
Mr. Oswald himself from behind his biscuit-boxes. 'Must have heard
it from the Rector's wife, and wanted to find out if it was true,
to go and tell Mrs. Walters o' such a bit o' turble presumptiousness.'
Meanwhile, in the little study with the bow-window over the shop,
Harry and Edie Oswald were busily discussing the necessary preparations
for Edie's long-promised visit to the University.
'I hope you've got everything nice in the way of dress, you know,
Edie,' said Harry. 'You'll want a decent dinner dress, of course,
for you'll be asked out to dine at least once or twice; and I want
you to have everything exceedingly proper and pretty.'
'I think I've got all I need in that way, Harry; I've my dark poplin,
cut square in the bodice, for one dinner dress, and my high black
silk to fall back upon for another. Worn open in front, with a lace
handkerchief and a locket, it does really very nicely. Then I've
got three afternoon dresses, the grey you gave me, the sage-greeny
aesthetic one, and the peacock-blue with the satin box-pleats. It's
a charming dress, the peacock-blue; it looks as if it might have
stepped straight out of a genuine Titian. It came home from Miss
Wells's this morning. Wait five minutes, like a dear boy, and I'll
run and put it on and let you see me in it.'
'That's a good girl, do. I'm so anxious you should have all your
clothes the exact pink of perfection, Popsy. Though I'm afraid I'm
a very poor critic in that matter--if you were only a problem in
space of four dimensions, now! Yet, after all, every man or woman
is more of a problem than anything in x square plus y square you
can possibly set yourself.'
Edie ran lightly up into her own room, and soon reappeared clad
resplendent in the new peacock-blue dress, with hat and parasol
to match, and a little creamy lamb's-wool scarf thrown with artful
carelessness around her pretty neck and shoulders. Harry looked at
her with unfeigned admiration. Indeed, you would not easily find
many lighter or more fairly-like little girls than Edie Oswald,
even in the beautiful half-Celtic South Hams of Devon. In figure
she was rather small than short, for though she was but a wee thing,
her form was so exactly and delicately modelled that she might have
looked tall if she stood alone at a little distance. She never
walked, but seemed to dance about from place to place, so buoyant
and light, that Harry doubted whether in her case gravitation could
really vary as the square of the distance--it seemed, in fact,
to be almost diminished in the proportions of the cube. Her hair
and eyes--such big bright eyes!--were dark; but her complexion
was scarcely brunette, and the colour in her cheeks was rich and
peach-like, after the true Devonian type. She was dimpled whenever
she smiled, and she smiled often; her full lips giving a peculiar
ripe look to her laughing mouth that suited admirably with her
light and delicate style of beauty. Perhaps some people might have
thought them too full; certainly they irresistibly suggested to
a critical eye the distinct notion of kissability. As she stood
there, faintly blushing, waiting to be admired by her brother, in
her neatly fitting dainty blue dress, her lips half parted, and her
arms held carelessly at her side, she looked about as much like a
fairy picture as it is given to mere human flesh and blood to look.
'It's delicious, Edie,' said Harry, surveying her from, head
to foot with a smile of satisfaction which made her blush deepen;
'it's simply delicious. Where on earth did you get the idea of it?'
'Well, it's partly the present style,' said Edie; 'but I took the
notion of the bodice partly too from that Vandyck, you know, in
the Palazzo Bossi at Genoa.'
'I remember, I remember,' Harry answered, contemplating her with
an admiring eye. 'Now just turn round and show me how it sits
behind, Edie. You recollect Théophile Gautier says the one great
advantage which a beautiful woman possesses over a beautiful statue
is this, that while a man has to walk round the beautiful statue
in order to see it from every side, he can ask the beautiful woman
to turn herself round and let him see her, without requiring to
take that trouble.'
'Théophile Gautier was a horrid man, and if anybody but my brother
quoted such a thing as that to me I should be very angry with him
indeed.'
'Théophile Gautier was quite as horrid as you consider him to be,
and if you were anybody but my sister it isn't probable I should
have quoted him to you. But if there is any statue on earth prettier
or more graceful than you are in that dress at this moment, Edie,
then the Venus of Milo ought immediately to be pulverised to ultimate
atoms for a rank artistic impostor.'
'Thank you, Harry, for the compliment. What pretty things you must
be capable of saying to somebody else's sister, when you're so
polite and courtly to your own.'
'On the contrary, Popsy, when it comes to somebody else's sister
I'm much too nervous and funky to say anything of the kind. But
you must at least do Gautier the justice to observe that if I had
described a circle round you, instead of allowing you to revolve
once on your own axis, I shouldn't have been able to get the gloss
on the satin in the sunlight as I do now that you turn the panniers
toward the window. That, you must admit, is a very important
aesthetic consideration.'
'Oh, of course it's essentially a sunshiny dress,' said Edie,
smiling. 'It's meant to be worn out of doors, on a fine afternoon,
when the light is falling slantwise, you know, just as it does now
through the low window. That's the light painters always choose
for doing satin in.'
'It's certainly very pretty,' Harry went on, musing; 'but I'm afraid
Le Breton would say it was a serious piece of economic hubris.'
'Piece of what?' asked Edie quickly.
'Piece of hubris--an economical outrage, don't you see; a gross
anti-social and individualist demonstration. Hubris, you know, is
Greek for insolence; at least, not quite insolence, but a sort
of pride and overweening rebelliousness against the gods, the kind
of arrogance that brings Nemesis after it, you understand. It was
hubris in Agamemnon and Xerxes to go swelling about and ruffling
themselves like turkey-cocks, because they were great conquerors
and all that sort of thing; and it was their Nemesis to get murdered
by Clytemnestra, or jolly well beaten by the Athenians at Salamis.
Well, Le Breton always uses the word for anything that he thinks
socially wrong--and he thinks a good many things socially wrong,
I can tell you--anything that partakes of the nature of a class
distinction, or a mere vulgar ostentation of wealth, or a useless
waste of good, serviceable, labour-gotten material. He would call
it hubris to have silver spoons when electroplate would do just as
well; or to keep a valet for your own personal attendant, making
one man into the mere bodily appanage of another; or to buy anything
you didn't really need, causing somebody else to do work for you
which might otherwise have been avoided.'
'Which Mr. Le Breton--the elder or the younger one?'
'Oh, the younger--Ernest. As for Herbert, the Fellow of St. Aldate's,
he's not troubled with any such scruples; he takes the world as he
finds it.'
'They've both gone in for their degrees, haven't they?'
'Yes, Herbert has got a fellowship; Ernest's up in residence still
looking about for one.'
'It's Ernest that would think my dress a piece of what-you-may-call-it?'
'Yes, Ernest.'
'Then I'm sure I shan't like him. I should insist upon every woman's
natural right to wear the dress or hat or bonnet that suits her
complexion best.'
'You can't tell, Edie, till you've met him. He's a very good
fellow; and of one thing I'm certain, whatever he thinks right he
does, and sticks to it.'
'But do YOU think, Harry, I oughtn't to wear a new peacock-blue
camel-hair dress on my first visit up to Oxford?'
'Well, Edie dear, I don't quite know what my own opinions are
exactly upon that matter. I'm not an economist, you see, I'm a man
of science. When I look at you, standing there so pretty in that
pretty dress, I feel inclined to say to myself, "Every woman ought
to do her best to make herself look as beautiful as she can for the
common delectation of all humanity." Your beauty, a Greek would
have said, is a gift from the gods to us all, and we ought all
gratefully to make the most of it. I'm sure _I_ do.'
'Thank you, Harry, again. You're in your politest humour this
afternoon.'
'But then, on the other hand, I know if Le Breton were here he'd
soon argue me over to the other side. He has the enthusiasm of
humanity so strong upon him that you can't help agreeing with him
as long as he's talking to you.'
'Then if he were here you'd probably make me put away the peacock-blue,
for fear of hubris and Nemesis and so forth, and go up to Oxford
a perfect fright in my shabby old Indian tussore!'
'I don't know that I should do that, even then, Edie. In the first
place, nothing on earth could make you look a perfect fright, or
anything like one, Popsy dear; and in the second place, I don't
know that I'm Socialist enough myself ever to have the courage of
my opinions as Le Breton has. Certainly, I should never attempt to
force them unwillingly upon others. You must remember, Edie, it's
one thing for Le Breton to be so communistic as all that comes to,
and quite another thing for you and me. Le Breton's father was a
general and a knight, you see; and people will never forget that
his mother's Lady Le Breton still, whatever he does. He may do
what he likes in the way of social eccentricities, and the world
will only say he's such a very strange advanced young fellow. But
if I were to take you up to Oxford badly dressed, or out of the
fashion, or looking peculiar in any way, the world wouldn't put it
down to our political beliefs, but would say we were mere country
tradespeople by birth, and didn't know any better. That makes a
lot of difference, you know.'
'You're quite right, Harry; and yet, do you know, I think there must
be something, too, in sticking to one's own opinions, like Mr. Le
Breton. I should stick to mine, I'm sure, and wear whatever dress
I liked, in spite of anybody. It's a sweet thing, really, isn't
it?' And she turned herself round, craning over her shoulder to look
at the effect, in a vain attempt to assume an objective attitude
towards her own back.
'I'm glad I'm going to Oxford at last, Harry,' she said, after a
short pause. 'I HAVE so longed to go all these years while you were
an undergraduate; and I'm dying to have got there, now the chance
has really come at last, after all. I shall glory in the place,
I'm certain; and it'll be so nice to make the acquaintance of all
your clever friends.'
'Well, Edie,' said her brother, smiling gently at the light, joyous,
tremulous little figure, 'I think I've done right in putting it
off till now. It's just as well you haven't gone up to Oxford till
after your trip on the Continent with me. That three months in
Paris, and Switzerland, and Venice, and Florence, did you a lot of
good, you see; improved you, and gave you tone, and supplied you
with things to talk about.'
'Why, you oughtn't to think I needed any improvement at all, sir,'
Edie answered, pouting; 'and as to talking, I'm not aware I had ever
any dearth of subjects for conversation even before I went on the
Continent. There are things enough to be said about heaven and earth
in England, surely, without one having to hurry through France and
Italy, like Cook's excursionists, just to hunt up something fresh
to chatter about. It's my belief that a person who can't find
anything new to say about the every-day world around her won't
discover much suggestive matter for conversation in a Continental
Bradshaw. It's like that feeble watery lady I met at the table
d'hote at Geneva. From something she said I gathered she'd been
in India, and I asked her how she liked it. "Oh," she said, "it's
very hot." I told her I had heard so before. Presently she said
something casually about having been in Brazil. I asked her what
sort of place Brazil was. "Oh." she said, "it's dreadfully hot."
I told her I'd heard that too. By-and-by she began to talk again
about Barbadoes. "What did you think of the West Indies?" I said.
"Oh," said she, "they're terribly hot, really." I told her I had
gathered as much from previous travellers. And that was positively
all in the end I ever got out of her, for all her travels.'
'My dear Edie, I've always admitted that you were simply perfect,'
Harry said, glancing at her with visible admiration, 'and I
don't think anything on earth could possibly improve you--except
perhaps a judicious course of differential and integral calculus,
which might possibly serve to tone down slightly your exuberant
and excessive vitality. Still, you know, from the point of view
of society, which is a force we have always to reckon with--a
constant, in fact, that we may call Pi--there can be no doubt in
the world that to have been on the Continent is a differentiating
factor in one's social position. It doesn't matter in the least
what your own private evaluation of Pi may be; if you don't happen
to know the particular things and places that Pi knows, Pi's evaluation
of you will be approximately a minimum, of that you may be certain.'
'Well, for my part, I don't care twopence about Pi as you call it,'
said Edie, tossing her pretty little head contemptuously; 'but
I'm very glad indeed to have been on the Continent for my own sake,
because of the pictures, and palaces, and mountains, and waterfalls
we've seen, and not because of Pi's opinion of me for having seen
them. I would have been the same person really whether I'd seen
them or not; but I'm so much the richer myself for that view from
the top of the Col de Balme, and for that Murillo--oh, do you
remember the flood of light on that Murillo?--in the far corner
of that delicious gallery at Bologna. Why, mother darling, what on
earth has been vexing you?'
'Nothing at all, Edie dear; leastways, that is, nothing to speak
of,' said her mother, coming up from the shop hot and flurried from
her desperate encounter with the redoubtable Miss Luttrell.
'Oh, I know just what it is, darling,' cried the girl, putting her
arm around her mother's waist caressingly, and drawing her down to
kiss her face half a dozen times over in her outburst of sympathy.
'That horrid old Miss Catherine has been here again, I'm sure, for
I saw her going out of the shop just now, and she's been saying
something or other spiteful, as she always does, to vex my dearie.
What did she say to you to-day, now do tell us, duckie mother?'
'Well, there,' said Mrs. Oswald, half laughing and half crying, 'I
can't tell 'ee exactly what she did say, but it was just the kind
of thing that she mostly does, impudent like, just to hurt a body's
feelings. She said you'd better not go to Oxford, Edie, but stop
at home and learn your catechism.'
'You might have pointed out to her, mother dear,' said the young
man, smoothing her hair softly with his hand, and kissing her
forehead, 'that in the most advanced intellectual centres the Church
catechism is perhaps no longer regarded as the absolute ultimatum
of the highest and deepest economical wisdom.'
'Bless your heart, Harry, what'd be the good of talking that way
to the likes of she? She wouldn't understand a single word of what
you were driving at. It must be all plain sailing with her, without
it's in the way of spite, and then she sees her chance to tack round
the hardest corner with half a wind in her sails only, as soon as
look at it. Her sharpness goes all off toward ill-nature, that it
do. Why, she said you'd got on at Oxford by good patronage!'
'There, you see, Edie,' cried Harry demonstratively, 'that's
an infinitesimal fraction of Pi; that's a minute decimal of this
great, sneering, ugly aggregate "society" that we have to deal with
whether we will or no, and that rends us and grinds us to powder
if only it can once get in the thin end of a chance. Take shaky
bitter old Miss Catherine for your unit, multiply her to the nth,
and there you see the irreducible power we have to fight against.
All one's political economy is very well in its way; but the
practical master of the situation is Pi, sitting autocratically in
many-headed judgment on our poor solitary little individualities,
and crushing us irretrievably with the dead weight of its inexorable
cumulative nothingness. And to think that that quivering old mass of
perambulating jealousy--that living incarnation of envy, hatred,
malice, and all uncharitableness--should be able to make you
uncomfortable for a single moment, mother darling, with her petty,
dribbling, doddering venom, why, it's simply unendurable.'
'There now, Harry,' said Mrs. Oswald, relenting, 'you mustn't be
too hard, neither, on poor old Miss Catherine. She's a bit soured,
you see, by disappointments and one thing and another. She doesn't
mean it, really, but it's just her nature. Folks can't be blamed
for their nature, now, can they?'
'It occurs to me,' said Harry quietly, 'that vipers only sting because
it's their nature; and Dr. Watts has made a similar observation
with regard to the growling and fighting of bears and lions. But
I'm not aware that anybody has yet proposed to get up a Society
for the protection of those much-misunderstood creatures, on the
ground that they are not really responsible for their own inherited
dispositions. Mr. William Sikes had a nature (no doubt congenital)
which impelled him to beat his wife--I'm not sure that she was
even his wife at all, now I come to think of it, but that's a mere
detail--and to kick his familiar acquaintances casually about the
head. We, on the other hand, have natures which impel us, when we
catch Mr. William Sikes indulging in these innate idiosyncrasies
by way of recreation, to clap him promptly into prison, and even,
under certain aggravating conditions, to cause him to be hanged
by the neck till he be dead. This may be a regrettable incident of
our own peculiar dispositions, mother dear, but it has at least
the same justification as Mr. Sikes's or the bears' and lions',
that 'tis our nature to. And I feel pretty much the same way about
old Miss Luttrell.'
'Well, there,' said his mother, kissing him gently, 'you're a bad
rebellious boy to be calling names, like a chatter-mag, and I won't
listen to you any longer. How pretty Edie do look in her new dress,
to be sure, Harry. I'll warr'nt there won't be a prettier girl
in Oxford next week than what she is; no, nor a better one and a
sweeter one neither.'
Harry put his arms round both their waists at once, with an
affectionate pressure; and they went down to their old-fashioned
tea together in the little parlour behind the shop, looking out over
the garden, and the beach, and the great cliffs beyond on either
hand, to the very farthest edge of the distant clear-cut blue
horizon.