There was a war of supremacy in the Kendal household. Albinia and her son were Greek to Greek, and if physical force were on her side, her own tenderness was against her. As to allies, Maurice had by far the majority of the household; the much-tormented Susan was her mistress’s sole supporter; Mr. Kendal and Sophy might own it inexpedient to foster his outrecuidance, but they so loved to do his bidding, so hated to thwart him, and so grieved at his being punished, that they were little better than Gilbert, Lucy, grandmamma, or any of the maids or men.
The moral sense was not yet stirred, and the boy seemed to be trying the force of his will like the strength of his limbs. Even as he delighted to lift a weight the moment he saw that it was heavy, so a command was to him a challenge to see how much he would undergo rather than obey, but his resistance was so open, gay, and free, that it could hardly be called obstinacy, and he gloried in disappointing punishment. The dark closet lost all terror for him; he stood there blowing the horn through his hand, content to follow an imaginary chase, and when untimely sent to bed, he stole Susan’s scissors, and cut a range of stables in the sheets. The short, sharp infliction of pain answered best, but his father, though he could give a shake when angry, could not strike when cool, and Albinia was forced to turn executioner, though with such tears and trembling that her culprit looked up reassuringly, saying, ‘Never mind, mamma, I shan’t!’ He did, however, mind her tears, they bore in upon him the sense of guilt; and after each transgression, he could not be at peace till he had marched up to her, holding out his hand for the blow, and making up his face not to wince, and then would cling round her neck to feel himself pardoned. Justice came to him in a most fair and motherly shape! The brightest, the merriest of all his playmates was mamma; he loved her passionately, and could endure no cloud between himself and her, so that he was slowly learning that submission to her was peace and pleasure, and rebellion mere pain to both. She established ten minutes of daily lessons, but even she could not reach beyond the capture of his restless person, his mind was out of reach, and keen as he was in everything else, towards “a + b = ab” he was an unmitigated dunce. Nor did he obey any one who did not use authority and force of will, and though perfectly simple and sincere, he was too young to restrain himself without the assistance of the controlling power, so that in his mother’s absence he was tyrannical and violent, and she never liked to have him out of her sight, and never was so sure that he was deep in mischief as when she had not heard his voice for a quarter of an hour.
‘Albinia,’ said Mr. Kendal, one relenting autumn day, when November strove to look like April, ‘I thought of walking to pay Farmer Graves for the corn. Will you come with me?’
‘Delightful, I want to see what Maurice will say to the turkey-cock.’
‘Is it not too far for him?’
‘He would run quite as many miles in the garden,’ said Albinia, who would have walked in dread of a court of justice on her return, had not the scarlet hose been safely prancing on the road before her.
‘This way, then,’ said Mr. Kendal; ‘I must get this draft changed at the bank. Come, Maurice, you will see a friend there.’
‘Do you know, Edmund,’ said Albinia, as they set forth, ‘my conscience smites me as to that youth; I think we have neglected him.’
‘I cannot see what more we could have done. If his uncle does not bring him forward in society, we cannot interfere.’
‘It must be a forlorn condition,’ said Albinia; ‘he is above the other clerks, and he seems to be voted below the Bayford Elite, since the Polysyllable has made it so very refined! One never meets him anywhere now it is too dark to walk after the banking hours. Cannot we ask him to come in some evening?’
‘We cannot have our evenings broken up,’ said Mr. Kendal. ‘I should be glad to show him any kindness, but his uncle seems to have ruled it that he is to be considered more as his clerk than as one of his family, and I doubt if it would be doing him any service to interfere.’
They were now at the respectable old freestone building, with ‘Goldsmith’ inscribed on the iron window-blinds, and a venerable date carved over the door. Inside, those blinds came high, and let in but little light over the tall desks, at which were placed the black-horsehair perches of the clerks, old Mr. Goldsmith himself occupying a lower throne, more accessible to the clients. One of the high stools stood empty, and Albinia making inquiry, Mr. Goldsmith answered, with a dry, dissatisfied cough, that More, as he called him, had struck work, and gone home with a headache.
‘Indeed,’ said Albinia, ‘I am sorry to hear it. Mr. Hope said he thought him not looking well.’
‘He has complained of headache a good deal lately,’ said Mr. Goldsmith. ‘Young men don’t find it easy to settle to business.’
Albinia’s heart smote her for not having thought more of her son’s rescuer, and she revolved what could or what might have been done. It really was not easy to show him attention, considering Gilbert’s prejudice against his accent, and Mr. Kendal’s dislike to an interrupted evening, and all she could devise was a future call on Miss Goldsmith. But for Maurice, it would have been a silent walk, and though her mind was a little diverted by his gallant attempt to bestride the largest pig in the farm-yard, she was sure Mr. Kendal was musing on the same topic, and was not surprised when, as they returned, he exclaimed, ‘I have a great mind to go and see after that poor lad.’
‘This way, then,’ said Albinia, turning down a narrow muddy street parallel with the river.
‘Impossible!’ said Mr. Kendal; ‘he can never live at the Wharves?’
‘Yes,’ said Albinia; ‘he told me that he lodged with an old servant of the Goldsmiths, Pratt’s wife, at the Lower Wharf.’
She pointed to the name of Pratt over a shop-window in a house that had once seen better days, but which looked so forlorn, that Mr. Kendal would not look the slatternly maid in the face while so absurd a question was asked as whether Mr. O’More lived there.
The girl, without further ceremony, took them up a dark stair, and opened the door of a twilight room, where Albinia’s first glimpse showed her the young man with his head bent down on his arms on the table, as close as possible to the forlorn, black fire, of the grim, dull, sulky coal of the county, which had filled the room with smoke and blacks. The window, opened to clear it, only admitted the sickly scent of decaying weed from the river to compete with the perfume of the cobbler’s stock-in-trade. Ulick started up pale and astonished, and Mr. Kendal, struck with consternation, chiefly thought of taking away his wife and child from the infected atmosphere, and made signs to Albinia not to sit down; but she was eagerly compassionate.
‘It was nothing,’ said Ulick, ‘only his head was rather worse than usual, and he thought it time to give in when the threes put lapwings’ feathers in their caps just like the fives.’
‘Are you subject to these headaches?’
‘It is only home-sickness,’ he said. ‘I’ll have got over it soon.’
‘I must come and see after you, my good friend,’ said Mr. Kendal, with suppressed impatience and anxiety. ‘I shall return in a moment or two, but I am sure you are not well enough for so many visitors taking you by surprise. Come.’
He was so peremptory, that Albinia found herself on the staircase before she knew what she was about. The fever panic had seized Mr. Kendal in full force; he believed typhus was in the air, and insisted on her taking Maurice home at once, while he went himself to fetch Mr. Bowles. She did not in the least credit fever to be in the chill touch of that lizard hand, and believed that she could have been the best doctor; but there was no arguing while he was under this alarm, and she knew that she might be thankful not to be ordered to observe a quarantine.
When Mr. Kendal returned home he looked much discomposed, though his first words were, ‘Thank Heaven, it is no fever! Albinia, we must look after that poor lad; he is positively poisoned by that pestiferous river and bad living! Bowles said he was sure he was not eating meat enough. I dare say that greasy woman gives him nothing fit to eat! Albinia, you must talk to him—find out whether old Goldsmith gives him a decent salary!’
‘He ought not to be in those lodgings another day. I suppose Miss Goldsmith had no notion what they were. I fancy she never saw the Lower Wharf in her life.’
‘I never did till to-day,’ said Mr. Kendal. ‘It was all of a piece—the whole street—the room—the furniture—why the paper was coming off the walls! What could they be dreaming of! And there he was, trying to read a little edition of Prodentius, printed at Salamanca, which he picked up at a bookstall at Galway. It must have belonged to some priest educated in Spain. He says any Latin book was invaluable to him. He is infinitely too good for his situation, and the Goldsmiths are neglecting him infamously. Look out some rooms fit for him, Albinia.’
‘I will try. Let me see—if I could only recollect any; but Mr. Hope has the only really nice ones in the place.’
‘Somewhere he must be, if it is in this house.’
‘There is poor old Madame Belmarche’s still empty, with Bridget keeping it. I wish he could have rooms there.’
‘Well, why not? Pettilove told me it must be let as two tenements. If the old woman could take half, a lodger would pay her rent,’ said Mr. Kendal, promptly. ‘You had better propose it.’
‘And the Goldsmiths?’ asked Albinia.
‘I will show him the Lower Wharf.’
The next afternoon Mr. Kendal desired his wife to go to the Bank and borrow young O’More for her walking companion.
‘Really I don’t know whether I have the impudence.’
‘I will come and do it for you. You will do best alone with the lad; I want you to get into his confidence, and find out whether old Goldsmith treats him properly. I declare, but that I know John Kendal so well, this would be enough to make me rejoice that Gilbert is not thrown on the world!’
Albinia knew herself to be so tactless, that she saw little hope other doing anything but setting him against his relations; but her husband was in no frame to hear objections, so she made none, and only trusted she should not be very foolish. At least, the walk would be a positive physical benefit to the slave of the desk.
Ulick O’More was at his post, and said his head was well, but his hair stuck up as if his fingers had been many times run through it; he was much thinner, and the wearied countenance, whitened complexion, and spiritless sunken eyes, were a sad contrast to the glowing freshness and life that had distinguished him in the summer.
Mr. Kendal told the Banker that it had been decided that his nephew needed exercise, and that Mrs. Kendal would be glad of his company in a long walk. Mr. Goldsmith seemed rather surprised, but consented, whereupon the young clerk lighted up into animation, and bounded out of his prison house, with a springy step learnt upon mountain heather. Mr. Kendal only waited to hear whither they were bound.
‘Oh! as far as we can go on the Woodside road,’ said Albinia. ‘I think the prescription I used to inflict on poor Sophy will not be thrown away here. I always fancy there is a whiff of sea air upon the hill there.’
Ulick smiled at such a fond delusion, bred up as he had been upon the wildest sea-coast, exposed to the full sweep of the Atlantic storm! She set him off upon his own scenery, to the destruction of his laborious English, as he dwelt on the glories of his beloved rocks rent by fierce sea winds and waves into fantastic, grotesque, or lovely shapes, with fiords of exquisite blue sea between, the variety of which had been to him as the gentle foliage of tamer countries. Not a tree stood near the ‘town’ of Ballymakilty, but the wild crags, the sparkling waters, the broad open hills, and the bogs, with their intensely purple horizon, held fast upon his heart; and he told of white sands, reported to be haunted by mermaids, and crevices of rock where the tide roared, and gave rise to legends of sea monsters, and giants turned to stone. He was becoming confidential and intimate when, in a lowered voice, he mentioned the Banshee’s crag, where the shrouded messenger of doom never failed to bewail each dying child of the O’More, and where his own old nurse had actually beheld her keening for the uncle who was killed among the Caffres. Albinia began to know how she ought to respect the O’Mores.
They were skirting the side of the hill, with a dip of green meadow-land below them, rising on the other side into coppices. The twang of the horn, and the babbling cry of the hounds, reminded Albinia that the hunting season had begun, and looking over a gate, she watched the parti-coloured forms of the dogs glancing among the brushwood opposite, and an occasional red coat gleaming out through the hedge above. Just then the cry ceased, the dogs became silent, and scattered hither and thither bewildered. Ulick looked eagerly, then suddenly vaulted over the gate, went forward a few steps, looked again, pointed towards some dark object which she could barely discern, put his finger in his ear, and uttered an unearthly screech, incomprehensible to her, but well understood by the huntsman, and through him by the dogs, which at once simultaneously dashed in one direction, and came pouring into the meadow over towards him, down went their heads, up went their curved tails, the clatter and rushing of hoofs, and the apparition of red coats, showed the hunters all going round the copse, while at the same moment, away with winged steps bounded her companion, flying headlong like the wind, so as to meet the hunt.
‘Ask me not what the lady feels,
Left in that dreadful hour alone,’
laughed Albinia to herself. ‘Well done, speed! Edmund might be satisfied there’s not much amiss! Through the hedge—over the meadow—a flying leap over the stream—it is more like a bird than a man—up again. Does he mean to follow the hunt all the rest of the way? Rather Irish, I must say! And I do believe they will all come down this lane! I must walk on; it wont do to be overtaken here between these high hedges. Ah! I thought he was too much of a gentleman to leave me—here he comes. How much in his way I must be! I never saw such a runner; not a bit does he slacken for the hill—and what bright cheeks and eyes! What good it must have done him!’
‘I beg ten thousand pardons!’ cried he, as he came up, scarcely out of breath. ‘I declare I forgot you, I could not help it, when I saw them at a check!’
‘You feel for the hunter as I do for the fox,’ said Albinia. ‘Is yours one of the great hunting neighbourhoods?’
‘That it is!’ he cried. ‘My grandfather had the grand stud! He and his seven sons were out three times in the week, and there was a mount for whoever wanted it!’
‘And this generation is not behind the last?’
‘Ah! and why would it be?’ exclaimed the boy, the last remnant of English pronunciation forsaking him. ‘My Uncle Connel has the best mare on this side the bridge of Athlone! I mean that side.’
‘And how is it with you?’ asked Albinia.
‘We’ve got no horses—that is, except my father’s mare, and the colt, and Fir Darrig—the swish-tailed pony—and the blind donkey that brings in the turf. So we younger ones mostly go hunting on foot; and after all I believe that’s the best sport. Bryan always comes in before any of the horses, and we all think it a shame if we don’t!’
‘I see where you learnt the swiftness of foot that was so useful last July,’ said Albinia.
‘That? oh! but Bryan would have been up long before me,’ said Ulick. ‘He’d have made for the lock, not the gate! You should see what sport we have when the fox takes to the Corrig Dearg up among the rocks—and little Rosie upon Fir Darrig, with her hair upon the wind, and her colour like the morning cloud, glancing in and out among the rocks like the fairy of the glen. There are those that think her the best part of the hunt; they say the English officers at Ochlochtimore would never think it worth coming out but for her. I don’t believe that, you know,’ he added, laughing, ‘though I like to fetch a rise out of Ulick at the great house by telling him of it.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Fifteen last April, and she is like an April wind, when it comes warm and frolicking over the sea! So wild and free, and yet so gentle and soft! Ellen and Mary are grave and steady, and work hard—every stitch of my stockings was poor Mary’s knitting, except what poor old Peggy would send up for a compliment; but Rosie—I don’t think she does a thing but sing, and ride, and row the boat, and keep the house alive! My mother shakes her head, but I don’t know what she’ll say when she gets my aunt’s letter. My Aunt Goldsmith purses up her lips, and says, “I’ll write to advise my sister to send her daughters to some good school.” Ellen, maybe, might bear one, but ah! the thought of little Rosie in a good school!’
‘Like her brother Ulick in a good bank, eh?’
‘Why,’ he cried, ‘they always called me the steady Englishman!’
Albinia laughed, but at that moment the sounds of the hunt again occupied them, and all were interpreted by Ulick with the keenest interest, but he would not run away again, though she exhorted him not to regard her. Presently it swept on out of hearing, and by-and-bye they reached the summit of the hill, and looked forth on the dark pine plantations on the opposite undulation, standing out in black relief against a sky golden with a pale, pure, pearly November sunset, a ‘daffodil sky’ flecked with tiny fleeces of soft bright-yellow light, reminding Albinia of Fouque’s beautiful dream of Aslauga’s golden hair showing the gates of Heaven to her devoted knight. She looked for her companion’s sympathy in her admiration, but the woods seemed to oppress him, and his panting sigh showed how real a thing was he-men.
‘Oh! my poor sun!’ he broke out, ‘I pity you for having to go down before your time into these black, stifling woods that rise up to smother you like giants—and not into your own broad, cool Atlantic, laughing up your own sparkles of light.’
‘We inland people can hardly appreciate your longing for space.’
‘It’s a very prison,’ said Ulick; ‘the horizon is choked all round, and one can’t breathe in these staid stiff hedges and enclosures!’ And he threw out his arms and flapped them over his breast with a gesture of constraint.
‘You seem no friend to cultivation.’
‘Why, your meadows would be pretty things if they were a little greener,’ said Ulick; ‘but one gets tired of them, and of those straight lines of ploughed field. There’s no sense of liberty; it is like the man whose prison walls closed in upon him!’ And he gave another weary sigh, his step lost elasticity, and he moved on heavily.
‘You are tired; I have brought you too far.’
‘Tired by a bit of a step like this?’ cried the boy, disdainfully, as he straightened himself, and resumed his brisk tread. But it did not last.
‘I had forgotten that you had not been well,’ she said.
‘Pshaw!’ muttered Ulick; then resumed, ‘Aye, Mr. Kendal brought in the doctor upon me—very kind of him—but I do assure you ‘tis nothing but home sickness; I was nearly as bad when I went to St. Columba, but I got over it then, and I will again!’
‘It may be so in part,’ said Albinia, kindly; ‘but let me be impertinent, Ulick, for my sister Winifred told me to look after you; surely you give it every provocation. Such a change of habits is enough to make any one ill. Should you not ask your uncle for a holiday, and go home for a little while?’
‘Don’t name it, I beg of you,’ cried the poor lad in an agitated voice, ‘it would only bring it all over again! I’ve promised my mother to do my part, and with His help I will! Let the columns run out to all eternity, and the figures crook themselves as spitefully as they will, I’ve vowed to myself not to stir till I’ve got the better of the villains!’
‘Ah!’ said Albinia, ‘they have blackened your eyes like the bruises of material antagonists! Yes, it is a gallant battle, but indeed you must give yourself all the help you can, for it would be doing your mother no good to fall ill.’
‘I’ve no fears,’ said Ulick; ‘I know very well what is the matter with me, and that if I don’t give way, it will go off in time. You’ve given it a good shove with your kindness, Mrs. Kendal,’ he added, with deep emotion in his sensitive voice; ‘only you must not talk of my going home, or you’ll undo all you have done.’
‘Then I won’t; we must try to make you a home here. And in the first place, those lodgings of yours; you can never be comfortable in them.’
‘Ah! you saw my fire smoking. I never shall learn to make a coal fire burn.’
‘Not only that,’ said Albinia, ‘but you might easily find rooms much better furnished, and fitter for you.’
‘I do assure you,’ exclaimed Ulick, ‘you scarcely saw it! Why, I don’t think there’s a room at the big house in better order, or so good!’
‘At least,’ said Albinia, repressing her deduction as to the big house of Ballymakilty, ‘you have no particular love for the locality—the river smell—the stock of good leather, &c.’
‘It’s all Bayford and town smell together,’ said Ulick; ‘I never thought one part worse than another, begging your pardon, Mrs. Kendal.’
‘And I am sure,’ she continued, ‘that woman can never make your meals comfortable. Yes, I see I am right, and I assure you hard head-work needs good living, and you will never be a match for the rogues in black and white without good beef-steaks. Now confess whether she gives you dinners of old shoe-leather.’
‘A man can’t sit down to dinner by himself,’ cried Ulick, impatiently. ‘Tea with a book are all that is bearable.’
‘And you never go out—never see any one.’
‘I dine at my uncle’s every Sunday,’ said Ulick.
‘Is that all the variety you have?’
‘Why, my uncle told me he would not have me getting into what he calls idle company. I’ve dined once at the vicarage, and drunk tea twice with Mr. Hope, but it is no use thinking of it—I couldn’t afford it, and that’s the truth.’
‘Have you any books? What can you find to do all the evening?’
‘I have a few that bear reading pretty often, and Mr. Hope as lent me some. I’ve been trying to keep up my Greek, and then I do believe there’s some way of simplifying those accounts by logarithms, if I could but work it out. But my mother told me to walk, and I assure you I do take a constitutional as soon as I come out at half-past four every day.’
‘Well, I have designs, and mind you don’t traverse them, or I shall have to report you at home. I have a lodging in my eye for you, away from the river, and a nice clean, tidy Irishwoman to keep you in order, make your fires, and cram you, if you wont eat, and see if she does not make a man of you—’
‘Stop, stop, Mrs. Kendal!’ cried Ulick, distressed. ‘You are very kind, but it can’t be.’
‘Excuse me, it is economy of the wrong sort to live in a gutter, and catch agues and fevers. Only think, if it was my boy Gilbert, should I not be obliged to any one that would tyrannize over him for his good! Besides, what I propose is not at all beyond such means as Mr. Kendal tells me are the least Mr. Goldsmith ought to give you. Do you dislike going into particulars with me? You know I am used to think for Gilbert, and I am a sort of cousin.’
‘You are kindness itself,’ said Ulick; ‘and there! I suppose I must go to the bottom of it, and it is no news that pence are not plenty among the O’Mores, though it is no fault of my uncle. See there what my poor dear mother says.’
He drew a letter from his pocket, and gave a page to her.
‘I miss you sorely, my boy,’ it said; ‘I know the more what a support and friend you have been to me now that you are so far away; but all is made up to me in knowing you to be among my own people, and the instrument of reconciliation with my brother, as you well know how great has been the pain of the estrangement caused by my own pride and wilfulness. I cannot tell you how glad I am that he approves of you, and that you are beginning to get used to the work that was my own poor father’s for so long. Bred up as you have been, my mountain lad, I scarcely dared to hope that you would be able to sit down quietly to it, with all our hopes of making you a scholar so suddenly frustrated; but I might have put faith in your loving heart and sense of duty to carry you through anything. I feel as if a load were off my mind since you and Bryan are so happily launched. The boy has not once applied for money since he joined; and if you write to him, pray beg him to be careful, for it would well-nigh drive your father mad to be pressed any more—the poor mare has been sold at a dead loss and the Carrick-humbug quarry company pays no dividends, so how we are to meet the Christmas bills I cannot guess. But, as you remember, we have won over worse times, and now Providence has been so good to you and Bryan, what have I to do but be thankful and hope the best.’
Ulick watched her face, and gave her another note, saying mournfully, ‘You see they all, but my mother, think, that if I am dragging our family honour through the mire, I’ve got something by it. Poor Bryan, he knows no better—he’s younger than me by two years.’
The young ensign made a piteous confession of the first debt he had been able to contract, for twenty pounds, with a promise that if his brother would help him out of this one scrape, he would never run into another.
‘I am very sorry for you, Ulick,’ said Albinia, ‘and I hate to advise you to be selfish, but it really is quite impossible for you to be paymaster for all your brothers’ debts.’
‘If it were Connel, I know it would be of no use,’ said Ulick. ‘But Bryan—you see he has got a start—they gave him a commission, and he is the finest fellow of us all, and knows what his word is, and keeps it! Maybe, if I get on, I may be able to save, and help him to his next step, and then if Redmond could get to college, my mother would be a happy woman, and all thanks to my uncle.’
‘Then it is this twenty pounds that is pinching you now? Is that it?’
‘You see my uncle said he would give me enough to keep me as a gentleman and his nephew, but not enough to keep all the family, as he said. After my Christmas quarter I shall be up in the world again, and then there will be time to think of the woman you spoke of—a Connaught woman, did you say?’
When Albinia reported this dialogue to her husband, he was much moved by this simple self-abnegation.
‘There is nothing for it,’ he said, ‘but to bring him here till Christmas, and by that time we will take care that the new lodgings are cheap enough for him. He must not be left to the mercy of old Goldsmith and his sister!’
Even Albinia was astonished, but Mr. Kendal carried out his intentions, and went in quest of his new friend; while no one thought of objecting except grandmamma.
‘I suppose, my dear,’ she said, ‘that you know what Mr. Goldsmith means to do for this young man.’
‘I am sure I don’t,’ said Albinia.
‘Really! Ah! well, I’m an old woman, and I may be wrong, but my poor dear Mr. Meadows would never encourage a banker’s clerk about the house unless he knew what were his expectations. Irish too! If there was a thing Mr. Meadows disliked more than another, it was an Irishman! He said they were all adventurers.’
However, Ulick’s first evening at Willow Lawn was on what he called ‘a headache day.’ He could not have taken a better measure for overcoming grandmamma’s objections. Poor dear Mr. Meadows’ worldly wisdom was not sufficiently native to her to withstand the sight of anything so pale and suffering, especially as he did not rebel against answering her close examination, which concluded in her pronouncing these intermitting attacks to be agueish, and prescribing quinine. To take medicines is an effectual way of gaining an old lady’s love. Ulick was soon established in her mind as ‘a very pretty behaved young gentleman.’
In the evenings, when Mr. Kendal read aloud, Ulick listened, and enjoyed it from the corner where he sheltered his eyes from the light. He was told that he ought to go to bed quickly, but after the ladies were in their rooms, a long buzzing murmur was heard in the passage, and judicious peeping revealed the two gentlemen, each, candle in hand, the one with his back against the wall at the top of the stairs, the other leaning upon the balusters three steps below, and there they stayed, till the clock struck one, and Ulick’s candle burnt out.
‘What could you be talking about?’ asked the aggrieved Albinia.
‘Prometheus Vinctus,’ composedly returned Mr. Kendal.
Ulick’s eagerness in collecting every crumb of scholarship was a great bond of union; but there was still more in the bright, open, demonstrative nature of the youth, which had a great attraction for the reserved, serious Mr. Kendal, and scarcely a day had passed before they were on terms of intimacy, almost like an elder and younger brother. Admitted into the family as a connexion, Ulick at once viewed the girls as cousins, and treated them with the same easy grace of good-natured familiarity as if they had been any of the nineteen Miss O’Mores around Ballymakilty.
‘How is your head now?’ asked Mr. Kendal. ‘You are late this evening.’
‘Yes,’ said Ulick, entering the drawing-room, which was ruddy with firelight, and fragrant with the breath of the conservatory, and leaning over an arm-chair, as he tried to rub the aching out of his brow; ‘there were some accounts to finish up and my additions came out different every time.’
‘A sure sign that you ought to have left off.’
‘I was just going to have told my uncle I was good for nothing to-day, when I heard old Johns mumbling something to him about Mr. More being unwell, and looking up, I saw that cold grey eye twinkling at me, as much as to say he was proud to see how soon an Irishman could be beaten. So what could I do but give him look for look, and go on with eight and seven, and five and two, as unconcerned as he was.’
‘Well,’ said Mr. Kendal, ‘you know I think that your uncle’s apparent indifference may be his fashion of being your best friend.’
‘I’d take it like sunshine in May from a stranger, and be proud to disappoint him,’ said Ulick, ‘but to call himself my uncle, and use my mother’s own eyes to look at me that way, that’s the stroke! and to think that I’m only striving to harden myself by force of habit to be exactly like him! I’d rather enlist to-morrow, if that would not be his greatest triumph!’ he cried, pressing his hands hard on his temple. ‘It is very childish, but I could forgive him anything but using my mother’s eyes that way!’
‘You will yet rejoice in the likeness,’ said Mr. Kendal. ‘You must believe in more than you can trace, and when your perseverance has conquered his esteem, the rest will follow.’
‘Follow? The rest, as you call it, would go before at home,’ sighed Ulick, wearily. ‘Esteem is like fame! what I want begins without it, and lives as well with or without it!’
‘Perhaps,’ said his friend, ‘Mr. Goldsmith would think it weakness to show preference to a relation before it was earned.’
‘Ah then,’ cried Ulick, in a quaint Irish tone, ‘Heaven have mercy on the little children!’
‘Yes, the doctrine can only be consistently held by a solitary man.’
‘Where would we be but for inconsistency?’ exclaimed Ulick.
‘I do not like to hear you talk in that manner,’ said Sophy. ‘Inconsistency is mere weakness.’
‘Ah! then you are the dangerous character,’ said Ulick, with a droll gesture of sheltering himself behind the chair.
‘I did not call myself consistent, I wish I were,’ she said, gravely.
‘How she must love the French!’ returned Ulick, confidentially turning to her father.
‘Not at all, I detest them.’
‘Then you are inconsistent, for they’re the very models of uncompromising consistency.’
‘Yes, to bad principles,’ said Sophy.
‘Robespierre was a prime specimen of consistency to good principle!’
Sophy turned to her father, and with an odd dubious look, asked him, ‘Is be teasing me?’
‘He’d be proud to have the honour,’ Ulick made answer, so that Mr. Kendal’s smile grew broad. It was the funniest thing to see Ulick sporting with Sophy’s gravity, constraining her to playfulness, with something of the compulsion exercised by a large frolicsome puppy upon a sober old dog of less size and strength.
‘I do not like to see powers wasted on paradox,’ she said, even as the grave senior might roll up his lip and snarl.
‘I’m in earnest, Sophy,’ pursued Ulick, changing his note to eagerness. ‘La grande nation herself finds that logic was her bane. Consistency was never made for man! Why where would this world be if it did not go two ways at once?’
Sophy did laugh at this Irish version of the centripetal and centrifugal forces, but she held out. ‘The earth describes a circle; I like straight lines.’
‘Much we shall have of the right direction, unless we are content to turn right about face,’ said Ulick. ‘The best path of life is but a herring-bone pattern.’
‘What does he know of herring-boning?’ asked Mrs. Kendal, coming in at the moment, with a white cashmere cloak folded picturesquely over her delicate blue silk. Ulick in a moment assumed a less careless attitude, as he answered—
‘I found my poetical illustration on the motion of the earth too much for her, so I descended to the herring-bone as more suited to her capacity.’
‘There he is, mamma,’ said Sophy, ‘pleading that consistency is the most ruinous thing in the world.’
‘I thought as much,’ said Albinia. ‘Prometheus and his kin do most abound when Ulick’s head is worst, and papa is in greatest danger of being late.’
Mr. Kendal turned round, looked at the time-piece, and marched off.
‘But mamma!’ continued Sophy, driving straight at her point, ‘what do you think of consistency?’
‘Oh, mamma!’ cried Lucy, coming into the room in a flutter of white; ‘there you are in your beautiful blue! Have you really put it on for the Drurys?’
Sophy bit her lip, neither pleased at the interruption, nor at the taste.
‘Have you a graduated scale of dresses for all your friends, Lucy? asked Ulick.
‘Everybody has, I suppose,’ said Lucy.
‘Ah! then I shall know how to judge how I stand in your favour. I never knew so well what the garb of friendship meant.’
‘You must know which way her scale goes,’ said Albinia, laughing at Sophy’s evident affront at the frivolous turn the conversation had taken.
‘That needs no asking,’ quoth Ulick, ‘Unadorned, adorned the most for the nearest the hearth.’
‘That’s all conceit,’ said Lucy. ‘Maybe familiarity breeds contempt.’
‘No, no, when young ladies despise, they use a precision that says, “‘Tis myself I care for, and not you.”’
‘What an observer!’ cried Lucy. ‘Now then, interpret my dress to-night!’
‘How can you, Lucy!’ muttered the scandalized Sophy.
‘Well, Sophy, as you will have him to torment with philosophy this whole evening, I think you might give him a little respite,’ said Lucy, good-humouredly. ‘I want to know what my dress reveals to him!’ and drawing up her head, where two coral pins contrasted with her dark braids, and spreading out her full white skirts and cerise trimmings, she threw her figure into an attitude, and darted a merry challenge from her lively black eyes, while Ulick availed himself of the permission to look critically, and Sophy sank back disgusted.
‘Miss Kendal can, when she is inclined, produce as much effect with her beams of the second order as with all her splendours displayed.’
‘Stuff,’ said Lucy.
‘Stuff indeed,’ more sincerely murmured Sophy.
‘Say something in earnest,’ said Lucy. ‘You professed to tell what I thought of the people.’
‘I hope you’ll never put on such new white gloves where I’m the party chiefly concerned.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They are a great deal too unexceptionable.’
If there were something coquettish in the manner of these two, it did not give Albinia much concern. It was in him ‘only Irish;’ and Fred Ferrars had made her believe that it was rather a sign of the absence of love than of its presence. She saw much more respect and interest in his mischievous attacks on Sophy’s gravity, and though Lucy both pitied him and liked chattering with him, it was all the while under the secret protest that he was only a banker’s clerk.
Sophy was glad of the presence of a third person to obviate the perils of her evenings with grandmamma, and she beheld the trio set off to their dinner-party, without the usual dread of being betrayed into wrangling. Mr. O’More devoted himself to the old lady’s entertainment, he amused her with droll stories, and played backgammon with her. Then she composed herself to her knitting, and desired them not to mind her, she liked to hear young people talk cheerfully; whereupon Sophy, by way of light and cheerful conversation, renewed the battle of consistency with a whole broadside of heavy metal.
When the diners-out came home, they found the war raging as hotly as ever; a great many historical facts and wise sayings having been fired off on both sides, and neither having found out that each meant the same thing.
However, the hours had gone imperceptibly past them, which could not be said for the others. The half-yearly dinners at Mr. Drury’s were Albinia’s dread nearly as much as Mr. Kendal’s aversion. He was certain, whatever he might intend, to fall into a fit of absence, and she was almost equally sure to hear something unpleasant, and to regret her own reply. On the whole, however, Mr. Kendal came away on this evening the least dissatisfied, for Mr. Goldsmith had asked him with some solicitude, whether he thought ‘that lad, young More,’ positively unwell; and had gone the length of expressing that he seemed to be fairly sharp, and stuck to his work. Mr. Kendal seized the moment for telling his opinion, of Ulick, and though Mr. Goldsmith coughed and looked dry and almost contemptuous, he was perceptibly gratified, and replied with a maxim evidently intended both as an excuse for himself and as a warning to the Kendals, that young men were always spoilt by being made too much of—in his younger days—&c.
Lucy, meantime, was undergoing the broad banter of her unrefined cousins on the subject of the Irish clerk. A very little grace in the perpetration would have made it grateful to her vanity, but this was far too broad raillery, and made her hold up her head with protestations of her perfect indifference, to which her cousins manifested incredulity, visiting on her with some petty spite their small jealousies of her higher pretensions, and of the attention which had been paid to her by Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy.
‘Not that he will ever look at you again, Lucy, you need not flatter yourself,’ said the amiable Sarah Anne. ‘Harry Wolfe writes that he was flirting with a beautiful young lady who came to see Oxford, and that he is spending quantities of money.’
‘It is nothing to me, I am sure,’ retorted Lucy. ‘Besides, Gilbert says no such thing.’
‘Gilbert! oh, no!’ exclaimed Miss Drury; ‘why, he is just as bad himself. Papa said, from what Mrs. Wolfe told him, he would not take 500 pounds to pay Mr. Gilbert’s bills.’
Albinia had been hearing much the same story from Mrs. Drury, though not so much exaggerated, and administered with more condolence. She did not absolutely believe, and yet she could not utterly disbelieve, so the result was a letter to Gilbert, with an anxious exhortation to be careful, and not to be deluded into foolish expenditure in imitation of the Polysyllable; and as no special answer was returned, she dismissed the whole from her mind as a Drury allegation.
The horse chanced to be lame, so that Gilbert could not be met at Hadminster on his return from Oxford, but much earlier than the omnibus usually lumbered into Bayford, he astonished Sophy, who was lying on the sofa in the morning-room, by marching in with a free and easy step, and a loose coat of the most novel device.
‘No one else at home?’ he asked.
‘Only grandmamma. We did not think the omnibus would come in so soon, but I suppose you took a fly, as there were three of you.’
‘As if we were going to stand six miles of bus with the Wolfe cub! No, Dusautoy brought his horse down with him, and I took a fly!’ said Gilbert. ‘Well, and what’s the matter with Captain; has the Irishman been riding him?’
Sophy bit her lip to prevent an angry answer, and was glad that Maurice rushed in, fall of uproarious joy. ‘Hollo! boy, how you grow! What have you got there?’
‘It’s my new pop-gun, that Ulick made me, I’ll shoot you,’ cried Maurice, retiring to a suitable distance.
‘I declare the child has caught the brogue! Is the fellow here still?’
‘What fellow?’ coldly asked Sophy.
‘Why, this pet of my father’s.’
‘Bang!’ cried Maurice, and a pellet passed perilously close to Gilbert’s eyes.
‘Don’t, child. Pray is this banker’s clerk one of our fixtures, Sophy?’
‘I don’t know why you despise him, unless it is because it is what you ought to be yourself,’ Sophy was provoked into retorting.
‘Apparently my father has a monomania for the article.’ Gilbert intended to speak with provoking coolness; but another fraternal pellet hit him fall in the nose, and the accompanying shout of glee was too much for an already irritated temper. With passion most unusual in him, he caught hold of the child, and exclaiming, ‘You little imp, what do you mean by it?’ he wrenched the weapon out of his hand, and dashed it into the fire, in the midst of an energetic ‘For shame!’ from his sister. Maurice, with a furious ‘Naughty Gilbert,’ struck at him with both his little fists clenched, and then precipitated himself over the fender to snatch his treasure from the grate, but was instantly captured and pulled back, struggling, kicking, and fighting with all his might, till, to the equal relief of both brothers, Sophy held up the pop-gun in the tongs, one end still tinged with a red glow, smoky, blackened, and perfumed. Maurice made one bound, she lowered it into his grasp as the last red spark died out, and he clasped it as Siegfried did the magic sword!
‘There, Maurice, I didn’t mean it,’ said Gilbert, heartily ashamed and sorry; ‘kiss and make it up, and then put on your hat, and we’ll come up to old Smith’s and get such a jolly one!’
The forgiving child had already given the kiss, glad to atone for his aggressions, but then was absorbed in rubbing the charred wood, amazed that while so much black came off on his fingers, the effect on the weapon was not proportionate, and then tried another shot in a safer direction. ‘Come,’ said Gilbert, ‘put that black affair into the fire, and come along.’
‘No!’ said Maurice; ‘it is my dear gun that Ulick made me, and it shan’t be burnt.’
‘What, not if I give you a famous one—like a real one, with a stock and barrel?’ said Gilbert, anxious to be freed from the tokens of his ebullition.
‘No! no!’ still stoutly said the constant Maurice. ‘I don’t want new guns; I’ve got my dear old one, and I’ll keep him to the end of his days and mine!’ and he crossed his arms over it.
‘That’s right, Maurice,’ said Sophy; ‘stick to old friends that have borne wounds in your service!’
‘Well, it’s his concern if he likes such a trumpery old thing,’ said Gilbert. ‘Come here, boy; you don’t bear malice! Come and have a ride on my back.’
The practical lesson, ‘don’t shoot at your brother’s nose,’ would never have been impressed, had not mamma, on coming in, found Maurice and his pop-gun nearly equally black, and by gradual unfolding of cause and effect, learnt his forgotten offence. She reminded him of ancient promises never to aim at human creatures, assured him that Gilbert was very kind not to have burnt it outright; and to the great displeasure, and temporary relief of all the family, sequestrated the weapon for the rest of the evening.
Sophy told her in confidence that Gilbert had been the most to blame, which she took as merely an instance of Sophy’s blindness to Maurice’s errors; for the explosion had so completely worked off the Oxford dash, that he was perfectly meek and amiable. Considering the antecedents, such a contrast to himself as young O’More could hardly fail to be an eyesore, walking tame about the home, and specially recommended to his friendship; but so good-natured was he, and so attractive was the Irishman, that it took much influence from Algernon Dusautoy to keep up a thriving aversion. Albinia marvelled at the power exercised over Gilbert by one whose intellect and pretensions he openly contemned, but perceived that obstinacy and undoubting self-satisfaction overmastered his superior intelligence and principle, and that while perceiving all the follies of the Polysyllable, Gilbert had a strange propensity for his company, and therein always resumed the fast man, disdainful of the clerk. He did not like Ulick better for being the immediate cause of the removal of the last traces of the Belmarche family from their old abode, which had been renovated by pretty shamrock chintz furniture, the pride of the two Irish hearts. Indeed it was to be feared that Bridget would assist in the perpetuation of those rolling R’s which caused Mr. Goldsmith’s brow to contract whenever his nephew careered along upon one.
His departure from Willow Lawn was to take place at Christmas. The Ferrars party were coming to keep the two consecutive birthdays of Sophy and Maurice at Bayford, would take him back for Christmas-day to Fairmead, and on his return he would take possession of his new rooms.
Maurice’s fete was to serve as the occasion of paying off civilities to a miscellaneous young party; but as grandmamma’s feelings would have been hurt, had not Sophy’s been equally distinguished, it was arranged that Mrs. Nugent should then bring her eldest girl to meet the Ferrarses at an early tea.
Just as Albinia had descended to await her guests, Gilbert came down, and presently said, with would-be indifference, ‘Oh, by-the-by, Dusautoy said he would look in.’
‘The Polysyllable!’ cried Albinia, thunderstruck; ‘what possessed you to ask him, when you knew I sacrificed Mr. Dusautoy rather than have him to spoil it all?’
‘I didn’t ask him exactly,’ replied Gilbert; ‘it was old Bowles, who met us, and tried to nail us to eat our mutton with him, as he called it. I had my answer, and Dusautoy got off by saying he was engaged to us, and desired me to tell you he would make his excuses in person.’
‘He can make no excuse for downright falsehood.’
‘Hem!’ quoth Gilbert. ‘You wouldn’t have him done into drinking old Bowles’s surgery champagne.’
‘One comfort is that he wont get any dinner,’ said Albinia, vindictively. ‘I hope he’ll be ravenously hungry.’
‘He may not come after all,’ said Gilbert; and Albinia, laying hold of that hope, had nearly forgotten the threatened disaster, as her party appeared by instalments, and Winifred owned to her that Sophy had grown better-looking than could have been expected. Her eyes had brightened, the cloudy brown of her cheeks was enlivened, she held herself better, and the less childish dress was much to her advantage. But above all, the moody look of suffering was gone, and her face had something of the grave sweetness and regular beauty of that of her father.
‘Seventeen,’ said Mrs. Ferrars; ‘by the time she is seventy, she may be a remarkably handsome woman!’
The tea-drinking was in lively operation, when after a thundering knock, Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy was ushered in, with the air of a prince honouring the banquet of his vassals, saying, ‘I told Kendal I should presume on your hospitality, I beg you will make no difference on my account.’
Of which gracious permission Albinia was resolved to avail herself. She left all the insincerity to her husband, and would by no means allow grandmamma to abdicate the warm corner. She suspected that he wanted an introduction to Mrs. Nugent, and was resolved to defeat this object, unless he should condescend to make the request, so she was well satisfied to see him wedged in between papa and Sophy, while a prodigious quantity of Irish talk was going on between Mrs. Nugent and Mr. O’More, with contributions of satire from Mr. Ferrars which kept every one laughing except little Nora Nugent and Mary Ferrars, who were deep in the preliminaries of an eternal friendship, and held the ends of each other’s crackers like a pair of doves. Lucy, however, was ill at ease at the obscurity which shrouded the illustrious guest, and in her anxiety, gave so little attention to her two neighbours, that Willie Ferrars, affronted at some neglect, exclaimed, ‘Why, Lucy, what makes you screw your eyes about so! you can’t attend to any one.’
‘It is because Polly Silly is there,’ shouted Master Maurice from his throne beside his mamma.
To the infinite relief of the half-choked Albinia, little Mary Ferrars, with whom her cousin had been carrying on a direful warfare all day, fitted on the cap, shook her head gravely at him, and after an appealing look of indignation, first at his mamma, then at her own, was overheard confiding to Nora Nugent that Maurice was a very naughty boy—she was sorry to say, a regular spoilt child.
‘But how should you hinder Miss Kendal from attending?’
‘I’ll tell you, darling. Poor Lucy! she is very fond of me, and I dare say she wanted me to sit next to her, but you know she will have me for three days, and I have you only this one evening. I’ll go and speak to her after tea, when we go into the drawing-room, and then she wont mind.’
Lucy, after an agony of blushes, had somewhat recovered on finding that no one seemed to apply her brother’s speech, and when the benevolent Mary made her way to her, and thrust a hand into hers, only a feeble pressure replied to these romantic blandishments, so anxious was she to carry to Mrs. Kendal the information that Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy had been so obliging as to desire his servant to bring his guitar and key-bugle.
‘We are much obliged,’ said Albinia, ‘but look at that face!’ and she turned Lucy towards Willie’s open-mouthed, dismayed countenance. You must tell him the company are not sufficiently advanced in musical science.’
‘But mamma, it would gratify him!’
‘Very likely’—and without listening further, Albinia turned to Willie, who had all day been insisting that papa should introduce her to the new game of the Showman.
Infinitely delighted to be relieved from the fear of the guitar, Willie hunted all who would play into another room; whence they were to be summoned, one by one, back to the drawing-room by the showman, Mr. Ferrars, who shrugged his shoulders at the task, but undertook it, and first called for Mrs. Kendal.
She found him stationed before the red curtains, which were closely drawn, and her husband and the three elder ladies sitting by as audience.
‘Pray, madam, may I ask what animal you would desire to have exhibited to you, out of the vast resources that my menagerie contains. Choose freely, I undertake that whatever you may select, you shall not be disappointed.’
‘What, not if I were to ask for a black spider monkey?’ said Albinia, to whom it was very charming to be playing with Maurice again.
Mr. Kendal looked up in entertained curiosity, Mrs. Nugent smiled as if she thought the showman’s task impossible, and Winifred stretched out to gain a full view.
‘A black spider monkey,’ he said, slowly. ‘Allow me to ask, madam, if you are acquainted with the character of the beast?’
‘It doesn’t scratch, does it?’ said she, quickly.
‘That is for you to answer.’
‘I never knew it do so. It does chatter a great deal, but it never scratched that I knew of.’
‘Nor I,’ said the showman, ‘since it was young. Do you think age renders it graver and steadier?’
‘Not a bit. It is always frisky and troublesome, and I never knew it get a bit better as it grew older.’
Winifred laughed outright. Mr. Kendal’s lips were parted by his smile. ‘I wonder what sort of a mother it would make?’ said the showman.
‘All animals are good mothers, of course.’
‘I meant, is it a good disciplinarian?’
‘If you mean cuffing its young one for playing exactly the same tricks as itself.’
‘Exactly; and what would be the effect of letting it and its young one loose in a great scholar’s study?’
‘There wouldn’t be much study left.’
‘And would it be for his good?’
‘Really, Mr. Showman, you ask very odd questions. Shall we try?’ said Albinia, with a skip backward, so as to lay her hand on the shoulder of her own great scholar, while the showman drew back the curtain, observing—‘I wish, ma’am, I could show “it and its young one” together, but the young specimen is unfortunately asleep. Behold the original black spider monkey!’
There stood the monkey, with sunny brown locks round the laughing glowing face, and one white paw still lying on the scholar’s shoulder—while his face made no assurance needful that it was very good for him! The mirror concealed behind the curtains was the menagerie! Albinia clapped her hands with delight, and pronounced it the most perfect of games.
‘And now let us have Willie,’ said Mrs. Ferrars; ‘it will conduce to the harmony of the next room.’
Willie, already initiated, hoped to puzzle papa as a platypus ornithoryncus, but was driven to allow that it was a nondescript animal, neither fish, flesh, nor good red-herring, useless, and very fond of grubbing in the mud; and if it were not at Botany Bay, it ought to be! The laughter that hailed his defence of its nose as ‘well, nothing particular,’ precipitated the drawing up of the curtain and his apparition in the glass: and then Nora Nugent being called, the inseparable Mary accompanied her, arm-in-arm, simpering an announcement that they liked nothing so well as a pair of dear little love-birds.
Oh, unpitying papa! to draw from the unsuspicious Nora the admission that they were very dull little birds, of no shape at all, who always sat hunched up in a corner without any fun, and people said their love was all stupidity and pretence; in fact, if she had one she should call it Silly Polly or Polly Silly!
To silence Willie’s exultation in his sister’s discomfiture, he was sent to fetch Lucy, whose impersonation of an argus pheasant would not have answered well but for a suggestion of Albinia, that she was eyes all over for any delinquency in school. Ulick O’More, owning with a sigh that he should like to see no beast better than a snipe, gave rise to much ingenuity by being led to describe it as of a class migratory, hard to catch, food for powder, given to long bills. There he guessed something, and stood on the defensive, but could not deny that its element was bogs, but that it had been seen skimming over water meadows, and finding sustenance in banks, whereupon the curtain rose. Ulick rushed upon the battles of his nation, and was only reduced to quiescence by the entrance of Sophy, who expressed a desire to see a coral worm, apparently perplexing the showman, who, to gain time, hemmed, and said, ‘A very unusual species, ma’am,’ which set all the younger ones in a double giggle, such as confused Sophy, to find herself standing up, with every one looking at her, and listening for her words. ‘I thought you undertook for any impossibility in earth air or water.’
‘Well, ma’am, do you take me for a mere mountebank? But when ladies and gentlemen take such unusual fancies—and for an animal that—you would not aver that it is often found from home?’
‘Never, I should say.’
‘Nor that it is accessible?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘And why is it so, ma’am?’
‘Why,’ said Sophy, bewildered into forgetting her natural history, ‘it lives at the bottom of the sea; that’s one thing.’
‘Where Truth lives,’ said a voice behind.
‘I beg to differ,’ observed Albinia. ‘Truth is a fresh water fish at the bottom of a well; besides, I thought coral worms were always close to the surface.’
‘But below it—not in everybody’s view,’ said Sophy—an answer which seemed much to the satisfaction of the audience, but the showman insisted on knowing why, and whether it did not conceal itself. ‘It makes stony caves for itself, out of sight,’ said Sophy, almost doubting whether she spoke correctly. ‘Well, surely it does so.’
‘Most surely,’ said an acclamation so general that she did not like it. If she had been younger, she would have turned sulky upon the spot, and Mr. Ferrars almost doubted whether to bring ont his final query. ‘Pray, ma’am, do you think this creature out of reach in its self-made cave, at the bottom—no, below the surface of the sea, would be popular enough to repay the cost of procuring it.’
‘Ah! that’s too bad,’ burst out the Hibernian tones. ‘Why, is not the best of everything hidden away from the common eye? Out of sight—stony cave—It is the secret worker that lays the true solid foundation, raises the new realms, and forms the precious jewels.’ The torrent of r’s was irresistible!
‘Police! order!’ cried the showman. ‘An Irish mob has got in, and there’s an end of everything.’ So up went the curtain, and the polyp appeared, becoming rapidly red coral as she perceived what the exhibition was, and why the politeness of the Green Isle revolted from her proclaiming her own unpopularity. But all she did was to turn gruffly aside, and say, ‘It is lucky there are no more ladies to come, Mr. Showman, or the mob would turn everything to a compliment.’
Gilbert’s curiosity was directed to the Laughing Jackass, and with too much truth he admitted that it took its tone from whatever it associated with, and caught every note, from the song of the lark to the bray of the donkey; then laughed good-humouredly when the character was fitted upon himself.
‘That is all, is it not?’ asked the showman. ‘I may retire into private life.’
‘Oh no,’ cried Willie; ‘you have forgotten Mr. Dusautoy.’
‘I was afraid you had,’ said Lucy, ‘or you could not have left him to the last.’
‘I am tempted to abdicate,’ said Mr. Ferrars.
‘No,’ Albinia said. ‘He must have his share, and no one but you can do it. Where can he be? the pause becomes awful!’
‘Willie is making suggestions,’ said Gilbert; ‘his imagination would never stretch farther than a lion. It’s what he thinks himself and no mistake.’
‘He is big enough to be the elephant,’ said little Mary.
‘The half-reasoning!’ said Ulick, softly; ‘and I can answer for his trunk, I saw it come off the omnibus.’
‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you persist in such disorderly conduct, the exhibition will close,’ cried the showman, waving his wand as Willie trumpeted Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy in, and on the demand what animal he wanted to see, twitched him as Flibbertigibbet did the giant warder, and caused him to respond—‘The Giraffe.’
‘Has it not another name, sir? A short or a long one, more or less syllables!’
‘Camelopard. A polysyllabic word, certainly,’ said Algernon, looking with a puzzled expression at the laughers behind; and almost imagining it possible that he could have made an error, he repeated, ‘Camel-le-o-pard. Yes, it is a polysyllable’—as, indeed, he had added an unnecessary syllable.
‘Most assuredly,’ said the showman, looking daggers at his suffocating sister. ‘May I ask you to describe the creature?’
‘Seventeen feet from the crown to the hoof, but falls off behind,’ said the accurate Mr. Dusautoy; ‘beautiful tawny colour.’
‘Nearly as good as a Lion,’ added Gilbert; but Algernon, fancying the game was by way of giving useful instruction to the children, went on in full swing. ‘Handsomely mottled with darker brown; a ruminating animal; so gentle that in spite of its size, none of my little friends need be alarmed at its vicinity. Inhabits the African deserts, but may be bred in more temperate latitudes. I myself saw an individual in the Jardin des Plantes, which was popularly said never to bend its neck to the ground, but I consider this a vulgar delusion, for on offering it food, it mildly inclined its head.’
‘Let us hope the present specimen is equally condescending,’ said Mr. Ferrars.
‘Eh! what! I see myself!’ said Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy, with a tone so inappreciably grand in mystification, that the showman had no choice but to share the universal convulsion of laughter, while Willie rolling on the floor with ecstasy, shouted, ‘Yes, it is you that are the thing with such a long name that it can’t bend its head to the ground!’
‘But too good-natured to be annoyed at folly,’ said Mr. Ferrars, perceiving that it was no sport to him.
‘This is the way my mischievous uncle has served us all in turn,’ said Lucy, advancing; ‘we have all been shown up, and there was mamma a monkey, and I an argus pheasant—’
‘Ah! I see,’ said the gentleman. ‘These are your rural pastimes of the season. Yes, I can take my share in good part, just as I have pelted the masks at the Carnival.’
‘Even a giraffe can bend his head and do at Rome as Rome does,’ murmured Ulick. But instead of heeding the audacious Irishman, Algernon patronized the showman by thanks for his exhibition; and then sitting down by Lucy, asked if he had ever told her of the tricks that he and il Principe Odorico Moretti used to play at Ems on the old Baron Sprawlowsky, while Mr. Ferrars, leaning over his sister’s chair, said aside, ‘I beg your pardon, Albinia; I should not have yielded to Willie. This “rural pastime” is only in season en famille.’
‘Never mind, it served him right.’
‘It may have served him right, but had we the right to serve him?’
‘I forgive your prudence for the sake of your folly. Could not Oxford have lessened his pomposity?’
‘It comes too late,’ said Maurice.
Before Ulick went to bed his pen and ink had depicted the entire caravan. The love-birds were pressed up together, with the individual features of the two young ladies, and completely little parrots; the snipe ran along the bars of the cage, looking exactly like all the O’Mores. The monkey showed nothing but the hands, but one held Maurice, and the other was clenched as if to cuff him, and grandest of all was, as in duty bound, Camelopardelis giraffa, thrown somewhat backwards, with such a majestic form, such a stalking attitude, loftily ruminating face, and legs so like the Cavendish Dusautoy’s last new pair of trousers, that Albinia could not help reserving it for the private delectation of his Aunt Fanny.
‘It and its young one,’ said Mr. Kendal, as he looked at her portrait; and the name delighted him so much, that he for some time applied it with a smile whenever his wife gave him cause to remember how much there was of the monkey in her composition.
It was the merriest Christmas ever known at Willow Lawn, and the first time there had been anything of the atmosphere of family frolic and fun. The lighting up of Sophy was one great ingredient; hitherto mirth had been merely endured by her, whereas now, improved health and spirits had made her take her share, amuse others and be amused, and cease to be hurt by the jarring of chance words. Lucy was lively as usual, but rather more excited than Albinia altogether liked; she was doubly particular about her dress; more disdainful of the common herd, and had a general air of exaltation that made Albinia rejoice when the Polysyllable, the horses, the key-bugle, and genre painting disappeared from the Bayford horizon.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg