MR. JABEZ DISSEMBLES.
La! Mr. Jabez, what a time it is since you called!’ said Mrs. Turvey,
with a toss of the head that sent her cap awry.
Mr. Jabez, who had come to see Mr. Egerton on behalf of the firm, and
was thus apostrophized in the hall by ‘the guardian angel of the house’
(the title Mr. Duck had himself conferred on her in a poetic flight),
felt very uncomfortable. He shone still, but very weakly; his shine was
like the second-hand business that the sun indulges in between a snow
and a thunderstorm on a modern midsummer day. He stammered out
something about business, and went very hot and red, and was intensely
relieved when Mr. Egerton called over the bannisters to him.
‘Come up, Duck,’ said Mr. Egerton; and Duck did go up, two stairs at a
time.
Mrs. Turvey looked after him.
‘So, Mr. Jabez Duck,’ she muttered, ‘you’re too busy to call, are
you?—and you haven’t a word to say for yourself. A pretty fine thing,
indeed, after coming here to tea week after week, and me a-buying
muffins and Sally Lungs, and delicacies no end for you, and then to be
treated like this. But you’ve got hold of the wrong sort, Mr. Jabez
Duck. I can tell you. I ain’t one o’ them slips o’ gals as is to be
made a fool of, and played fast and loose with.’
It was, perhaps, hardly necessary for Mrs. Turvey to state that she was
not a slip of a girl. No one could have brought such an accusation
against her.
To tell the truth, the love affairs of Jabez and Susan had not
progressed lately so satisfactorily as could be wished by the lady. Up
to the time of Mr. Egerton’s sudden reappearance in the land of the
living, Jabez had been most assiduous. The wooing, it is true, had not
been very long or very romantic—they were past the age of ‘linked
sweetness long drawn out’—but it would be impossible to say that the
courting had been devoid of poetry.
Jabez had inundated the lady with poetry. Susan had a nice little
collection of Jabez’s poems upstairs. ‘I wish he wouldn’t write such
rigmaroles,’ she said one day, as she tried to understand a ‘Sonnet to
my Susan,’ which Jabez sent on a sheet of Grigg and Limpet’s headed
note, and which he assured her he had composed with his window open,
gazing at the stars, and thinking of her. Mrs. Turvey, reading the
following, might well require time to consider what it meant:
SONNET TO MY SUSAN.=
The stars are in the sky, Susan,
And I am sitting here;
But you are in my eye, Susan,
Among the moonbeams clear.
My heart your image holds, Susan,
And will the while it beats,
All through the winter colds, Susan,
As well as summer heats.
I think of you by morn, Susan,
I think of you by night,
My love, oh, do not scorn, Susan,
My hopes, oh, do not blight!
The bullseye of my soul, Susan,
Thy dart of love has struck,
And while the ages roll, Susan,
I’ll be your Jabez Duck.
This was only one of the ‘rigmar’oles’ in writing which Jabez had
begirded the time of Grigg and Limpet, which hung heavily on his
hands—too heavily to be relieved by anything but verse. Now all of
these ‘rigmaroles,’ full of poetical declarations, Mrs. Turvey, being a
wise woman, had treasured, and Mr. Duck was painfully aware of the
fact.
Things had altered considerably with the reappearance of Mr. Egerton.
Susan still remained—but where was her legacy? Jabez was a poet, but
there was quite enough prose in his composition to appreciate the
difference between Mrs. Turvey plus five hundred pounds and Mrs. Turvey
pure and simple.
Pure Mrs. Turvey was, but perhaps simple is hardly the word to apply to
her. Jabez declared that she was anything but simple when she gave him
a bit of her mind that morning as he came down from his interview with
the master. She put the case very neatly indeed; Grigg and Limpet
couldn’t have put it better. Jabez had proposed and been accepted. Mrs.
Turvey was anxious to give up housekeeping for some one else and take
to it on her own account; and, having been led to believe that she
would be Mrs. Duck, she was not inclined to be disappointed.
As a business woman, Mrs. Turvey put it very plainly to Mr. Duck as a
business man. If within a specified time he was not prepared to carry
out his contract, Mrs. Turvey would consult Messrs. Grigg and Limpet,
and appeal to a jury of her fellow-countrymen.
‘And if them rigmaroles of yours as I’ve got upstairs, every one on’em
a-breathin love and nightingales, and stars and things, ain’t evidence
enough to convict a man of horse-stealing, my name ain’t Susan Turvey.’
Why Mrs. Turvey should imagine that stealing her heart was
horse-stealing I can’t say. She was given to a confusion of metaphors.
But Jabez had no difficulty in apprehending her meaning. The situation
which the indignant Susan conjured up to his mind, of Grigg and Limpet
being instructed to commence an action for breach against their own
clerk, and, worst of all, the idea of his letters being read in court,
so thoroughly overcame him, that he could only give two short gasps for
breath and stagger down the steps.
When he got out of sight of Mrs. Turvey standing like Nemesis at the
front door, he paused and wiped the perspiration from his face.
‘My poems,’ he murmured, ‘and in full court. Published in all the
papers. Here’s a pretty mess I’m in!’
Once Mr. Jabez had had dreams of publishing his poems; now there was a
chance of his dream being gratified, but it was Dead Sea fruit.
He walked on, a prey to a variety of emotions. Gradually he Worked
himself into a rage.
‘It’s all that cursed Egerton!’ he exclaimed, giving the firm’s client
an imaginary kick. ‘Why didn’t he stop at the bottom of the sea,
instead of turning up in this Coburg melodrama style? He robbed me of
£500 and let me in for a breach.’
The more Mr. Duck thought of the grievous injury which Gurth Egerton
had inflicted on him, the more annoyed he became. Susan’s £500 was just
the little capital Jabez wanted to make a start in life on his own
account, in a line for which he had alwy’s had a fancy, Now, not only
was that rudely dashed from his grasp, but Susan remained on his hands.
All day long Mrs. Turvey’s threat rang in his ears. He got trying to
remember what the poems were about. He regretted now that he had let
the divine afflatus run him into so many extravagances of diction. He
felt that as a poet he had said more than he meant as a man.
It would never do to let those poems come out. Never. There was but one
alternative. He must marry the lady to whom they were addressed, and
thus make them his property again, unless—well, unless he could get
possession of the poems without taking possession of the owner.
Could he?
That was the question.
Mr. Jabez had been brought up to the law, and he knew what he might do
and what he might not do. He would do a good deal to get those letters
back again. He sat down in the office with a deed in front of him,
which he was expected to read, but his thoughts were elsewhere. They
were on a deed of daring in which he was the hero. Idea after idea
floated through his brain. Wills and valuable documents he had seen
abstracted by the score in dramas and comedies, but then the purloiner
only had to walk from the wings and enter R. U. E. or L. U. E., as the
case might be’. There was no front-door to be got through without
ringing the bell; no owner of the property handy to call the police.
Dramatic authors always keep the coast so beautifully dear for their
evil-doers.
If, however, Mr. Jabez was constrained, after consideration, to abandon
all idea of imitating the heroes of melodrama in their wilder flights
of daring, his thoughts had not wandered in that direction quite in
vain. From the villain of the domestic drama he determined at least to
take a hint. That interesting personage does not generally go about his
nefarious deeps openly. He dissembles.
That was exactly what Jabez determined to do. Instead of rushing
headlong into the imminent deadly breach—breach of promise—he would
bide his time and dissemble.
He commenced dissembling that very evening, by calling on his way home
and assuring Mrs. Turvey that her accusations were quite unjust, and
that he should be happy to eat the pipelet of peace and drink the tea
of tranquillity with her whenever she would condescend to invite him.
Mrs. Turvey was partially appeased, and exerted herself to win the
wanderer back again. Jabez had no reason to complain of the result of
his first essay in the art of dissembling.
He learned where Susan kept his letters.