"If _one of my own dear boys was grown up_, and passing his Christmas
alone in a strange land."
I reeled. The room swam before me. It was too awful. So all that
Lucretia had ever felt was a mere motherly interest in me as a solitary
English boy away from his domestic turkey on the twenty-fifth of
December! Terrible, hideous, blighting fact! Lucretia was married!
The rector's refreshments in the adjoining dining-room only went to the
length of sponge-cake and weak claret-cup. I managed to get away from
the piano without fainting, and swallowed about a quart of the
intoxicating beverage by tumblerfuls. When I had recovered sufficiently
from the shock to trust my tongue, I ventured back into the
drawing-room. It struck me then that I had never yet heard Lucretia's
surname. When she and her brother arrived in the early part of the
evening, Mrs. Pritchard had simply introduced them to me by saying, "I
think you know Tom and Lucretia already." Colonial manners are so
unceremonious.
I joined the fatal group once more. "Do you know," I said, addressing
Lucretia with as little tremor in my voice as I could easily manage,
"it's very curious, but I have never heard your surname yet."
"Dear me," cried Lucretia, "I quite forgot. Our name is Arundel."
"And which is Mr. Arundel?" I continued. "I should like to make his
acquaintance."
"Why," answered Lucretia with a puzzled expression of face, "you've met
him already. Here he is!" And she took a neighbouring young man in
unimpeachable evening dress gently by the arm. He turned round. It
required a moment's consideration to recognize in that tall and
gentlemanly young fellow with the plain gold studs and turndown collar
my rough acquaintance of last night, Tom himself!
I saw it in a flash. What a fool I had been! I might have known they
were husband and wife. Nothing but a pure piece of infatuated
preconception could ever have made me take them for brother and sister.
But I had so fully determined in my own mind to win Lucretia for myself
that the notion of any other fellow having already secured the prize had
never struck me.
It was all the fault of that incomprehensible Canadian society, with its
foolish removal of the natural barriers between classes. My mother was
quite right. I should henceforth be a high-and-dry conservative in all
matters matrimonial, return home in the spring with heart completely
healed, and after passing correctly through a London season, marry the
daughter of a general or a Warwickshire squire, with the full consent of
all the high contracting parties, at St. George's, Hanover Square. With
this noble and moral resolution firmly planted in my bosom, I made my
excuses to the rector and his good little wife, and left Richmond for
ever the very next morning, without even seeing Lucretia once again.
But, somehow, I have never quite forgotten that journey from Quebec on
Christmas Eve; and though I have passed through several London seasons
since that date, and undergone increasingly active sieges from mammas
and daughters, as my briefs on the Oxford Circuit grow more and more
numerous, I still remain a bachelor, with solitary chambers in St.
James's. I sometimes fancy it might have been otherwise if I could only
once have met a second paragon exactly like Lucretia.
_THE THIRD TIME._