I AM FREE OF MABEL HARKER—RETURN TO “THE FRENCH HORN”—DISASTROUS
INTERFERENCE OF HAROLD FORSYTH IN MY AFFAIRS
IT was the 13th of October, as I very well remember, that, shortly after
Mabel’s return to England from Switzerland, she wrote me an incoherent
epistle, begging me to come up to town and see her at once, for that she
was the most miserable of girls and had sad news for me, signed “your
heartbroken Mabel.” I must say I was glad to hear it, and greatly looked
forward to the sad news; since I very well knew it could only be that
another wooer had stepped up on to the Regent’s Park _tapis_, and one a
good deal more determined to win her than I. Directly I got there and
found the fire wasn’t lit in the drawing-room, though it was horribly
cold, I knew I was right, and the interview was meant to be brief and
painful.
It was the same room, by-the-way (though the fire had been lit for us
then!) in which I had made my unfortunate declaration in the early
spring, soon after Easter—a declaration precipitated by Mabel, who
began playing the piano, but soon broke down over it and wept, alleging
me to be the cause of her unhappiness; which, being uncommon
tender-hearted where the sex are concerned, completely bowled me over
and drove me to propose.
When she came in this time, with melancholy mouth but unmistakably
triumphant eyes, she at once told me the sad news; to which I listened
with as gloomy a face as I could, demanding in hoarse tones the name of
my successful rival. I could scarcely contain my mirth when I heard it
was Byles, the man she had so often laughed at in her letters from
Lucerne, as girls not infrequently do at the man they are one day
destined to marry. But I must say I think she might at any rate have
_offered_ to send me my presents back, for there are many of them
(particularly a diamond and sapphire ring—cost me eighteen pounds) I
should have liked to have given Lucy. I make no manner of doubt that if
it had been garnets and carnelian, I should have had it back at once in
a registered letter.
Directly our painful interview was over, I hurried back to Nesshaven and
“The French Horn,” feeling happier than I had done for months past, a
free man, and my heart beating so rapturously I believe an old lady in
the carriage with me heard it, she looked so frightened at my
restlessness.
But at “The French Horn” a blow awaited me, from which, when I think of
it, I yet reel; for judge of my stupor when, on my gay return, I was
met, not by Lucy, towards whom I was so impetuously rushing to tell all,
but by the whiskified thunders of Mr. Thatcher, who took me at once into
the bar-parlor, and proceeded there and then to claw me about the ears
with the angry rhetoric of a theatrically outraged heavy father.
Of course he was quite right; but then I was myself _now_ quite right,
too; and when he talked in real Adelphi fashion about stealing
affections and repaying him in this way, I was—thank Heaven!—in a
position to be angry too, and give him as good as he gave me.
So I let him fume on till he ran himself down, when I temperately
explained what my position really was, and how I was altogether free;
and how, above all, that if Lucy cared for me, as I very well knew she
did, I was going to marry her at once, and (if not precisely in the
immediate neighborhood of “The French Horn”) settle down and live
happily ever after.
Whereupon Mr. Thatcher’s easily corrugated brow began as easily to
clear, and he steadied himself and seized and shook me by the wrong
hand. So we sat down and had a cigar and a split whiskey-and-soda, and
he was good enough to say he had known all along (from the way I had
always paid my bill, I suppose) that he could trust me implicitly, and
all would come right in the end.
But in the meantime he had shipped off dear Lucy to her aunt’s school in
the Ladbroke Grove Road, where she had gone back—very tearfully, poor
child, at the news of my supposed treachery—to her altogether
uncongenial employment with the younger children.
By judicious pumping I discovered it was Harold Forsyth who had blown
upon me and “queered my pitch,” as showmen say, having come over from
Colchester to play golf, and been seized upon by the watchful Thatcher,
who of course had noticed my unremitting attentions to his daughter.
Upon which Harold, either because he fancied it his duty (old friends
are often very inconsiderate) or from sheer stupidity, had let slip the
disastrous news of my engagement to another lady; though, as a matter of
fact, at the very moment of their conversation it was off and I was
free.
Old Mrs. Thatcher took the situation in at a glance, and, either from a
natural desire to see her granddaughter properly settled or from pure
friendship for me, who had always been attentive to her, and once took a
bee out of her hair (that animal being almost the only living thing she
really feared), immediately suggested I should go off at once to the
Ladbroke Grove Road, provided with a letter to the aunt from Mr.
Thatcher, in which everything was explained, and I was given authority
to interview and settle matters with my dear sweetheart. So, next
morning early, off I drove to Nesshaven Station in the milk cart, gay as
a lark—that chorister of the poor and the cheerful well-to-do—and by
twelve o’clock was rattling in a cab down the Ladbroke Grove Road.