The moon was over sea. Coasting vessels that had run into the bay for shelter from the North wind lay with their shadows thrown shoreward on the cold smooth water, almost to the verge of the beach, where there was neither breath nor sound of wind, only the lisp at the pebbles.
Mrs. Crickledon’s dinner and the state of his heart made young Fellingham indifferent to a wintry atmosphere. It sufficed him that the night was fair. He stretched himself on the shingle, thinking of the Manzanilla, and Annette, and the fine flavour given to tobacco by a dry still air in moonlight—thinking of his work, too, in the background, as far as mental lassitude would allow of it. The idea of taking Annette to see his first play at the theatre when it should be performed—was very soothing. The beach rather looked like a stage, and the sea like a ghostly audience, with, if you will, the broadside bulks of black sailing craft at anchor for representatives of the newspaper piers. Annette was a nice girl; if a little commonplace and low-born, yet sweet. What a subject he could make of her father! “The Deserter” offered a new complication. Fellingham rapidly sketched it in fancy—Van Diemen, as a Member of the Parliament of Great Britain, led away from the House of Commons to be branded on the bank! What a magnificent fall! We have so few intensely dramatic positions in English real life that the meditative author grew enamoured of this one, and laughed out a royal “Ha!” like a monarch reviewing his well-appointed soldiery.
“There you are,” said Van Diemen’s voice; “I smelt your pipe. You’re a rum fellow, to belying out on the beach on a cold night. Lord! I don’t like you the worse for it. Twas for the romance of the moon in my young days.”
“Where is Annette?” said Fellingham, jumping to his feet.
“My daughter? She ‘s taking leave of her intended.”
“What’s that?” Fellingham gasped. “Good heavens, Mr. Smith, what do you mean?”
“Pick up your pipe, my lad. Girls choose as they please, I suppose”
“Her intended, did you say, sir? What can that mean?”
“My dear good young fellow, don’t make a fuss. We’re all going to stay here, and very glad to see you from time to time. The fact is, I oughtn’t to have quarrelled with Mart Tinman as I’ve done; I’m too peppery by nature. The fact is, I struck him, and he forgave it. I could n’t have done that myself. And I believe I’m in for a headache to-morrow; upon my soul, I do. Mart Tinman would champagne us; but, poor old boy, I struck him, and I couldn’t make amends—didn’t see my way; and we joined hands over the glass—to the deuce with the glass!—and the end of it is, Netty—she did n’t propose it, but as I’m in his—I say, as I had struck him, she—it was rather solemn, if you had seen us—she burst into tears, and there was Mrs. Cavely, and old Mart, and me as big a fool—if I’m not a villain!”
Fellingham perceived a more than common effect of Tin man’s wine. He touched Van Diemen on the shoulder. “May I beg to hear exactly what has happened?”
“Upon my soul, we’re all going to live comfortably in Old England, and no more quarreling and decamping,” was the stupid rejoinder. “Except that I did n’t exactly—I think you said I exactly’?—I did n’t bargain for old Mart as my—but he’s a sound man; Mart’s my junior; he’s rich. He’s eco ... he’s eco... you know—my Lord! where’s my brains?—but he’s upright—‘nomical!”
“An economical man,” said Fellingham, with sedate impatience.
“My dear sir, I’m heartily obliged to you for your assistance,” returned Van Diemen. “Here she is.”
Annette had come out of the gate in the flint wall. She started slightly on seeing Herbert, whom she had taken for a coastguard, she said. He bowed. He kept his head bent, peering at her intrusively.
“It’s the air on champagne,” Van Diemen said, calling on his lungs to clear themselves and right him. “I was n’t a bit queer in the house.”
“The air on Tinman’s champagne!” said Fellingham.
“It must be like the contact of two hostile chemical elements.”
Annette walked faster.
They descended from the shingle to the scant-bladed grass-sweep running round the salted town-refuse on toward Elba. Van Diemen sniffed, ejaculating, “I’ll be best man with Mart Tinman about this business! You’ll stop with us, Mr.——what’s your Christian name? Stop with us as long as you like. Old friends for me! The joke of it is that Nelson was my man, and yet I went and enlisted in the cavalry. If you talk of chemical substances, old Mart Tinman was a sneak who never cared a dump for his country; and I’m not to speak a single sybbarel about that..... over there... Australia... Gippsland! So down he went, clean over. Very sorry for what we have done. Contrite. Penitent.”
“Now we feel the wind a little,” said Annette.
Fellingham murmured, “Allow me; your shawl is flying loose.”
He laid his hands on her arms, and, pressing her in a tremble, said, “One sign! It’s not true? A word! Do you hate me?”
“Thank you very much, but I am not cold,” she replied and linked herself to her father.
Van Diemen immediately shouted, “For we are jolly boys! for we are jolly boys! It’s the air on the champagne. And hang me,” said he, as they entered the grounds of Elba, “if I don’t walk over my property.”
Annette interposed; she stood like a reed in his way.
“No! my Lord! I’ll see what I sold you for!” he cried. “I’m an owner of the soil of Old England, and care no more for the title of squire than Napoleon Bonaparty. But I’ll tell you what, Mr. Hubbard: your mother was never so astonished at her dog as old Van Diemen would be to hear himself called squire in Old England. And a convict he was, for he did wrong once, but he worked his redemption. And the smell of my own property makes me feel my legs again. And I’ll tell you what, Mr. Hubbard, as Netty calls you when she speaks of you in private: Mart Tinman’s ideas of wine are pretty much like his ideas of healthy smells, and when I’m bailiff of Crikswich, mind, he’ll find two to one against him in our town council. I love my country, but hang me if I don’t purify it—”
Saying this, with the excitement of a high resolve a upon him, Van Diemen bored through a shrubbery-brake, and Fellingham said to Annette:
“Have I lost you?”
“I belong to my father,” said she, contracting and disengaging her feminine garments to step after him in the cold silver-spotted dusk of the winter woods.
Van Diemen came out on a fish-pond.
“Here you are, young ones!” he said to the pair. “This way, Fellowman. I’m clearer now, and it’s my belief I’ve been talking nonsense. I’m puffed up with money, and have n’t the heart I once had. I say, Fellowman, Fellowbird, Hubbard—what’s your right name?—fancy an old carp fished out of that pond and flung into the sea. That’s exile! And if the girl don’t mind, what does it matter?”
“Mr. Herbert Fellingham, I think, would like to go to bed, papa,” said Annette.
“Miss Smith must be getting cold,” Fellingham hinted.
“Bounce away indoors,” replied Van Diemen, and he led them like a bull.
Annette was disinclined to leave them together in the smoking-room, and under the pretext of wishing to see her father to bed she remained with them, though there was a novel directness and heat of tone in Herbert that alarmed her, and with reason. He divined in hideous outlines what had happened. He was no longer figuring on easy ice, but desperate at the prospect of a loss to himself, and a fate for Annette, that tossed him from repulsion to incredulity, and so back.
Van Diemen begged him to light his pipe.
“I’m off to London to-morrow,” said Fellingham. “I don’t want to go, for very particular reasons; I may be of more use there. I have a cousin who’s a General officer in the army, and if I have your permission—you see, anything’s better, as it seems to me, than that you should depend for peace and comfort on one man’s tongue not wagging, especially when he is not the best of tempers if I have your permission—without mentioning names, of course—I’ll consult him.”
There was a dead silence.
“You know you may trust me, sir. I love your daughter with all my heart. Your honour and your interests are mine.”
Van Diemen struggled for composure.
“Netty, what have you been at?” he said.
“It is untrue, papa!” she answered the unworded accusation.
“Annette has told me nothing, sir. I have heard it. You must brace your mind to the fact that it is known. What is known to Mr. Tinman is pretty sure to be known generally at the next disagreement.”
“That scoundrel Mart!” Van Diemen muttered.
“I am positive Mr. Tinman did not speak of you, papa,” said Annette, and turned her eyes from the half-paralyzed figure of her father on Herbert to put him to proof.
“No, but he made himself heard when it was being discussed. At any rate, it’s known; and the thing to do is to meet it.”
“I’m off. I’ll not stop a day. I’d rather live on the Continent,” said Van Diemen, shaking himself, as to prepare for the step into that desert.
“Mr. Tinman has been most generous!” Annette protested tearfully.
“I won’t say no: I think you are deceived and lend him your own generosity,” said Herbert. “Can you suppose it generous, that even in the extremest case, he should speak of the matter to your father, and talk of denouncing him? He did it.”
“He was provoked.”
“A gentleman is distinguished by his not allowing himself to be provoked.”
“I am engaged to him, and I cannot hear it said that he is not a gentleman.”
The first part of her sentence Annette uttered bravely; at the conclusion she broke down. She wished Herbert to be aware of the truth, that he might stay his attacks on Mr. Tinman; and she believed he had only been guessing the circumstances in which her father was placed; but the comparison between her two suitors forced itself on her now, when the younger one spoke in a manner so self-contained, brief, and full of feeling.
She had to leave the room weeping.
“Has your daughter engaged herself, sir?” said Herbert.
“Talk to me to-morrow; don’t give us up if she has we were trapped, it’s my opinion,” said Van Diemen. “There’s the devil in that wine of—Mart Tinman’s. I feel it still, and in the morning it’ll be worse. What can she see in him? I must quit the country; carry her off. How he did it, I don’t know. It was that woman, the widow, the fellow’s sister. She talked till she piped her eye—talked about our lasting union. On my soul, I believe I egged Netty on! I was in a mollified way with that wine; all of a sudden the woman joins their hands! And I—a man of spirit will despise me!—what I thought of was, ‘now my secret’s safe!’ You’ve sobered me, young sir. I see myself, if that’s being sober. I don’t ask your opinion of me; I am a deserter, false to my colours, a breaker of his oath. Only mark this: I was married, and a common trooper, married to a handsome young woman, true as steel; but she was handsome, and we were starvation poor, and she had to endure persecution from an officer day by day. Bear that situation in your mind.... Providence dropped me a hundred pounds out of the sky. Properly speaking, it popped up out of the earth, for I reaped it, you may say, from a relative’s grave. Rich and poor ‘s all right, if I’m rich and you’re poor; and you may be happy though you’re poor; but where there are many poor young women, lots of rich men are a terrible temptation to them. That’s my dear good wife speaking, and had she been spared to me I never should have come back to Old England, and heart’s delight and heartache I should not have known. She was my backbone, she was my breast-comforter too. Why did she stick to me? Because I had faith in her when appearances were against her. But she never forgave this country the hurt to her woman’s pride. You’ll have noticed a squarish jaw in Netty. That’s her mother. And I shall have to encounter it, supposing I find Mart Tinman has been playing me false. I’m blown on somehow. I’ll think of what course I’ll take ‘twixt now and morning. Good night, young gentleman.”
“Good night; sir,” said Herbert, adding, “I will get information from the Horse Guards; as for the people knowing it about here, you’re not living much in society—”
“It’s not other people’s feelings, it’s my own,” Van Diemen silenced him. “I feel it, if it’s in the wind; ever since Mart Tinman spoke the thing out, I’ve felt on my skin cold and hot.”
He flourished his lighted candle and went to bed, manifestly solaced by the idea that he was the victim of his own feelings.
Herbert could not sleep. Annette’s monstrous choice of Tinman in preference to himself constantly assailed and shook his understanding. There was the “squarish jaw” mentioned by her father to think of. It filled him with a vague apprehension, but he was unable to imagine that a young girl, and an English girl, and an enthusiastic young English girl, could be devoid of sentiment; and presuming her to have it, as one must, there was no fear, that she would persist in her loathsome choice when she knew her father was against it.
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