THE LAST OF MISS THOROUGHBUNG.
Mr. Prosper, with that kind of energy which was distinctively his own,
had sent off his letter to Harry Annesley, with his postscript in it
about his blighted matrimonial prospects,--a letter easy to be
written,--before he had completed his grand epistle to Miss Thoroughbung.
The epistle to Miss Thoroughbung was one requiring great consideration.
It had to be studied in every word, and re-written again and again with
the profoundest care. He was afraid that he might commit himself by an
epithet. He dreaded even an adverb too much. He found that a full stop
expressed his feelings too violently, and wrote the letter again, for
the fifth time, because of the big initial which followed the full stop.
The consequence of all this long delay was, that Miss Thoroughbung had
heard the news, through the brewery, before it reached her in its
legitimate course. Mr. Prosper had written his postscript by accident,
and, in writing it, had forgotten the intercourse between his
brother-in-law's house and the Buntingford people. He had known well of
the proposed marriage; but he was a man who could not think of two
things at the same time, and thus had committed the blunder.
Perhaps it was better for him as it was; and the blow came to him with a
rapidity which created less of suffering than might have followed the
slower mode of proceeding which he had intended. He was actually making
the fifth copy of the letter, rendered necessary by that violent full
stop, when Matthew came to him and announced that Miss Thoroughbung was
in the drawing-room. "In the house!" ejaculated Mr. Prosper.
"She would come into the hall; and then where was I to put her?"
"Matthew Pike, you will not do for my service." This had been said about
once every three months throughout the long course of years in which
Matthew had lived with his master.
"Very well, sir. I am to take it for a month's warning, of course."
Matthew understood well enough that this was merely an expression of his
master's displeasure, and, being anxious for his master's welfare, knew
that it was decorous that some decision should be come to at once as to
Miss Thoroughbung, and that time should not be lost in his own little
personal quarrel. "She is waiting, you know, sir, and she looks uncommon
irascible. There is the other lady left outside in the carriage."
"Miss Tickle! Don't let her in, whatever you do. She is the worst. Oh
dear! oh dear! Where are my coat and waistcoat, and my braces? And I
haven't brushed my hair. And these slippers won't do. What business has
she to come at this time of day, without saying a word to anybody?" Then
Matthew went to work, and got his master into decent apparel, with as
little delay as possible. "After all," said Mr. Prosper, "I don't think
I'll see her. Why should I see her?"
"She knows you are at home, sir."
"Why does she know I'm at home? That's your fault. She oughtn't to know
anything about it. Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!" These last ejaculations
arose from his having just then remembered the nature of his postscript
to Harry Annesley, and the engagement of Joe Thoroughbung to his niece.
He made up his mind at the moment,--or thought that he had made up his
mind,--that Harry Annesley should not have a shilling as long as he
lived. "I am quite out of breath. I cannot see her yet. Go and offer the
lady cake and wine, and tell her that you had found me very much
indisposed. I think you will have to tell her that I am not well enough
to receive her to-day."
"Get it over, sir, and have done with it."
"It's all very well to say have done with it. I shall never have done
with it. Because you have let her in to-day she'll think that she can
come always. Good Lord! There she is on the stairs! Pick up my
slippers." Then the door was opened, and Miss Thoroughbung herself
entered the room. It was an up-stairs chamber, known as Mr. Prosper's
own: and from it was the door into his bedroom. How Miss Thoroughbung
had learned her way to it he never could guess. But she had come up the
stairs as though she had been acquainted with all the intricacies of the
house from her childhood.
"Mr. Prosper," she said, "I hope I see you quite well this morning, and
that I have not disturbed you at your toilet." That she had done so was
evident, from the fact that Matthew, with the dressing-gown and
slippers, was seen disappearing into the bedroom.
"I am not very well, thank you," said Mr. Prosper, rising from his
chair, and offering her his hand with the coldest possible salutation.
"I am sorry for that,--very. I hope it is not your indisposition which
has prevented you from coming to see me. I have been expecting you every
day since Soames wrote his last letter. But it's no use pretending any
longer. Oh, Peter, Peter!" This use of his Christian name struck him
absolutely dumb, so that he was unable to utter a syllable. He should,
first of all, have told her that any excuse she had before for calling
him by his Christian name was now at an end. But there was no opening
for speech such as that. "Well," she continued, "have you got nothing to
say to me? You can write flippant letters to other people, and turn me
into ridicule glibly enough."
"I have never done so."
"Did you not write to Joe Thoroughbung, and tell him you had given up
all thoughts of having me?"
"Joe!" he exclaimed. His very surprise did not permit him to go farther,
at the moment, than this utterance of the young man's Christian name.
"Yes, Joe,--Joe Thoroughbung, my nephew, and yours that is to be. Did you
not write and tell him that everything was over?"
"I never wrote to young Mr. Thoroughbung in my life. I should not have
dreamed of such a correspondence on such a subject."
"Well, he says you did. Or, if you didn't write to Joe himself, you
wrote to somebody."
"I may have written to somebody, certainly."
"And told them that you didn't mean to have anything farther to say to
me?" That traitor Harry had now committed a sin worse that knocking a
man down in the middle of the night and leaving him bleeding,
speechless, and motionless; worse than telling a lie about it;--worse
even than declining to listen to sermons read by his uncle. Harry had
committed such a sin that no shilling of allowance should evermore be
paid to him. Even at this moment there went through Mr. Prosper's brain
an idea that there might be some unmarried female in England besides
Miss Puffle and Miss Thoroughbung. "Peter Prosper, why don't you answer
like a man, and tell me the honest truth?" He had never before been
called Peter Prosper in his whole life.
"Perhaps you had better let me make a communication by letter," he said.
At that very moment the all but completed epistle was lying on the table
before him, where even her eyes might reach it. In the flurry of the
moment he covered it up.
"Perhaps that is the letter which has taken you so long to write?" she
said.
"It is the letter."
"Then hand it me over, and save yourself the penny stamp." In his
confusion he gave her the letter, and threw himself down on the sofa
while she read it. "You have been very careful in choosing your
language, Mr. Prosper: 'It will be expedient that I should make known to
you the entire truth.' Certainly, Mr. Prosper, certainly. The entire
truth is the best thing,--next to entire beer, my brother would say."
"The horrid vulgar woman!" Mr. Prosper ejaculated to himself. "'There
seems to have been a complete misunderstanding with regard to that
amiable lady, Miss Tickle.' No misunderstanding at all. You said you
liked her, and I supposed you did. And when I had been living for twenty
years with a female companion, who hasn't sixpence in the world to buy a
rag with but what she gets from me, was it to be expected that I should
turn her out for any man?"
"An annuity might have been arranged, Miss Thoroughbung."
"Bother an annuity! That's all you think about feelings! Was she to go
and live alone and desolate because you wanted some one to nurse you?
And then those wretched ponies. I tell you, Peter Prosper, that let me
marry whom I will, I mean to drive a pair of ponies, and am able to do
so out of my own money. Ponies, indeed! It's an excuse. Your heart has
failed you. You've come to know a woman of spirit, and now you are
afraid that she'll be too much for you. I shall keep this letter, though
it has not been sent."
"You can do as you please about that, Miss Thoroughbung."
"Oh yes; of course I shall keep it, and shall give it to Messrs. Soames
& Simpson. They are most gentlemanlike men, and will be shocked at such
conduct as this from the Squire of Buston. The letter will be published
in the newspapers, of course. It will be very painful to me, no doubt,
but I shall owe it to my sex to punish you. When all the county are
talking of your conduct to a lady, and saying that no man could have
done it, let alone no gentleman, then you will feel it. Miss Tickle,--and
a pair of ponies! You expected to get my money and nothing to give for
it. Oh, you mean man!"
She must have been aware that every word she spoke was a dagger. There
was a careful analysis of his peculiar character displayed in every word
of reproach which she uttered. Nothing could have wounded him more than
the comparison between himself and Soames & Simpson. They were
gentlemen! "The vulgarest men in all Buntingford!" he declared to
himself, and always ready for any sharp practice. Whereas he was no man,
Miss Thoroughbung said,--a mean creature, altogether unworthy to be
regarded as a gentleman. He knew himself to be Mr. Prosper of Buston
Hall, with centuries of Prospers for his ancestors; whereas Soames was
the son of a tax-gatherer, and Simpson had come down from London as a
clerk from a solicitor's office in the City. And yet it was true that
people would talk of him as did Miss Thoroughbung! His cruelty would be
in every lady's mouth. And then his stinginess about the ponies would be
the gossip of the county for twelve months. And, as he found out what
Miss Thoroughbung was, the disgrace of even having wished to marry her
loomed terribly large before him.
But there was a twinkle of jest in the lady's eyes all the while which
he did not perceive, and which, had he perceived it, he could not have
understood. Her anger was but simulated wrath. She, too, had thought
that it might be well, under circumstances, if she were to marry Mr.
Prosper, but had quite understood that those circumstances might not be
forthcoming. "I don't think it will do at all, my dear," she had said to
Miss Tickle. "Of course an old bachelor like that won't want to have
you."
"I beg you won't think of me for a moment," Miss Tickle had answered,
with solemnity.
"Bother! why can't you tell the truth? I'm not going to throw you over,
and of course you'd be just nowhere if I did. I shan't break my heart
for Mr. Prosper. I know I should be an old fool if I were to marry him;
and he is more of an old fool for wanting to marry me. But I did think
he wouldn't cut up so rough about the ponies." And then, when no answer
came to the last letter from Soames & Simpson, and the tidings reached
her, round from the brewery, that Mr. Prosper intended to be off, she
was not in the least surprised. But the information, she thought, had
come to her in an unworthy manner. So she determined to punish the
gentleman, and went out to Buston Hall and called him Peter Prosper. We
may doubt, however, whether she had ever realized how terribly her
scourges would wale him.
"And to think that you would let it come round to me in that way,
through the young people,--writing about it just as a joke!"
"I never wrote about it like a joke," said Mr. Prosper, almost crying.
"I remember now. It was to your nephew; and of course everybody at the
rectory saw it. Of course they were all laughing at you." There was one
thing now written in the book of fate, and sealed as certainly as the
crack of doom: no shilling of allowance should ever be paid to Harry
Annesley. He would go abroad. He said so to himself as he thought of
this, and said also that, if he could find a healthy young woman
anywhere, he would marry her, sacrificing every idea of his own
happiness to his desire of revenge upon his nephew. This, however, was
only the passionate feeling of the moment. Matrimony had become
altogether so distasteful to him, since he had become intimately
acquainted with Miss Thoroughbung, as to make any release in that manner
quite impossible to him. "Do you propose to make me any amends?" asked
Miss Thoroughbung.
"Money?" said he.
"Yes; money. Why shouldn't you pay me money? I should like to keep three
ponies, and to have Miss Tickle's sister to come and live with me."
"I do not know whether you are in earnest, Miss Thoroughbung."
"Quite in earnest, Peter Prosper. But perhaps I had better leave that
matter in the hands of Soames & Simpson,--very gentleman-like men,--and
they'll be sure to let you know how much you ought to pay. Ten thousand
pounds wouldn't be too much, considering the distress to my wounded
feelings." Here Miss Thoroughbung put her handkerchief up to her eyes.
There was nothing that he could say. Whether she were laughing at him,
as he thought to be most probable, or whether there was some grain of
truth in the demand which she made, he found it equally impossible to
make any reply. There was nothing that he could say; nor could he
absolutely turn her out of the room. But after ten minutes' farther
continuation of these amenities, during which it did at last come home
to his brain that she was merely laughing at him, he began to think that
he might possibly escape, and leave her there in possession of his
chamber.
"If you will excuse me, Miss Thoroughbung, I will retire," he said,
rising from the sofa.
"Regularly chaffed out of your own den!" she said, laughing.
"I do not like this interchange of wit on subjects that are so serious."
"Interchange! There is very little interchange, according to my idea.
You haven't said anything witty. What an idea of interchange the man
has!"
"At any rate I will escape from your rudeness."
"Now, Peter Prosper, before you go let me ask you one question. Which of
the two has been the rudest to the other? You have come and asked me to
marry you, and have evidently wished to back out of it from the moment
in which you found that I had ideas of my own about money. And now you
call me rude, because I have my little revenge. I have called you Peter
Prosper, and you can't stand it. You haven't spirit enough to call me
Matty Thoroughbung in reply. But good-bye, Mr. Prosper,--for I never will
call you Peter again. As to what I said to you about money, that, of
course, is all bosh. I'll pay Soames's bill, and will never trouble you.
There's your letter, which, however, would be of no use, because it is
not signed. A very stupid letter it is. If you want to write naturally
you should never copy a letter. Good-bye, Mr. Prosper--Peter that never
shall be." Then she got up and walked out of the room.
Mr. Prosper, when he was left alone, remained for a while nearly
paralyzed. That he should have ever entertained the idea of making that
woman his wife! Such was his first thought. Then he reflected that he
had, in truth, escaped from her more easily than he had hoped, and that
she had certainly displayed some good qualities in spite of her
vulgarity and impudence. She did not, at any rate, intend to trouble him
any farther. He would never again hear himself called Peter by that
terribly loud voice. But his anger became very fierce against the whole
family at the rectory. They had ventured to laugh at him, and he could
understand that, in their eyes, he had become very ridiculous.
He could see it all,--the manner in which they had made fun of him, and
had been jocose over his intended marriage. He certainly had not
intended to be funny in their eyes. But, while he had been exercising
the duty of a stern master over them, and had been aware of his own
extreme generosity in his efforts to forgive his nephew, that very
nephew had been laughing at him, in conjunction with the nephew of her
whom he had intended to make his wife! Not a shilling, again, should
ever be allowed to Harry Annesley. If it could be so arranged, by any
change of circumstances, he might even yet become the father of a family
of his own.