Annette Smith’s delight in her
native England made her see beauty and kindness everywhere
around her; it put a halo about the house on the beach,
and thrilled her at Tinman’s table when she heard
the thunder of the waves hard by. She fancied
it had been a most agreeable dinner to her father
and Mr. Herbert Fellingham especially to
the latter, who had laughed very much; and she was
astonished to hear them at breakfast both complaining
of their evening. In answer to which, she exclaimed,
“Oh, I think the situation of the house is so
romantic!”
“The situation of the host is
exceedingly so,” said Mr. Fellingham; “but
I think his wine the most unromantic liquid I have
ever tasted.”
“It must be that!” cried
Van Diemen, puzzled by novel pains in the head.
“Old Martin woke up a little like his old self
after dinner.”
“He drank sparingly,” said Mr. Fellingham.
“I am sure you were satirical last night,”
Annette said reproachfully.
“On the contrary, I told him I thought he was
in a romantic situation.”
“But I have had a French mademoiselle
for my governess and an Oxford gentleman for my tutor;
and I know you accepted French and English from Mr.
Tinman and his sister that I should not have approved.”
“Netty,” said Van Diemen,
“has had the best instruction money could procure;
and if she says you were satirical, you may depend
on it you were.”
“Oh, in that case, of course!”
Mr. Fellingham rejoined. “Who could help
it?”
He thought himself warranted in giving
the rein to his wicked satirical spirit, and talked
lightly of the accidental character of the letter H
in Tinman’s pronunciation; of how, like somebody
else’s hat in a high wind, it descended on somebody
else’s head, and of how his words walked about
asking one another who they were and what they were
doing, danced together madly, snapping their fingers
at signification; and so forth. He was flippant.
Annette glanced at her father, and dropped her eyelids.
Mr. Fellingham perceived that he was enjoined to be
on his guard.
He went one step farther in his fun;
upon which Van Diemen said, with a frown, “If
you please!”
Nothing could withstand that.
“Hang old Mart Tinman’s
wine!” Van Diemen burst out in the dead pause.
“My head’s a bullet. I’m in
a shocking bad temper. I can hardly see.
I’m bilious.”
Mr. Fellingham counselled his lying
down for an hour, and he went grumbling, complaining
of Mart Tinman’s incredulity about the towering
beauty of a place in Australia called Gippsland.
Annette confided to Mr. Fellingham,
as soon as they were alone, the chivalrous nature
of her father in his friendships, and his indisposition
to hear a satirical remark upon his old schoolmate,
the moment he understood it to be satire.
Fellingham pleaded: “The
man’s a perfect burlesque. He’s as
distinctly made to be laughed at as a mask in a pantomime.”
“Papa will not think so,”
said Annette; “and papa has been told that he
is not to be laughed at as a man of business.”
“Do you prize him for that?”
“I am no judge. I am too
happy to be in England to be a judge of anything.”
“You did not touch his wine!”
“You men attach so much importance to wine!”
“They do say that powders is
a good thing after Mr. Tinman’s wine,”
observed Mrs. Crickledon, who had come into the sitting-room
to take away the breakfast things.
Mr. Fellingham gave a peal of laughter;
but Mrs Crickledon bade him be hushed, for Mr. Van
Diemen Smith had gone to lay down his poor aching
head on his pillow. Annette ran upstairs to speak
to her father about a doctor.
During her absence, Mr. Fellingham
received the popular portrait of Mr. Tinman from the
lips of Mrs. Crickledon. He subsequently strolled
to the carpenter’s shop, and endeavoured to
get a confirmation of it.
“My wife talks too much,” said Crickledon.
When questioned by a gentleman, however,
he was naturally bound to answer to the extent of
his knowledge.
“What a funny old country it
is!” Mr. Fellingham said to Annette, on their
walk to the beach.
She implored him not to laugh at anything English.
“I don’t, I assure you,”
said he. “I love the country, too.
But when one comes back from abroad, and plunges into
their daily life, it’s difficult to retain the
real figure of the old country seen from outside,
and one has to remember half a dozen great names to
right oneself. And Englishmen are so funny!
Your father comes here to see his old friend, and
begins boasting of the Gippsland he has left behind.
Tinman immediately brags of Helvellyn, and they fling
mountains at one another till, on their first evening
together, there’s earthquake and rupture they
were nearly at fisticuffs at one time.”
“Oh! surely no,” said
Annette. “I did not hear them. They
were good friends when you came to the drawingroom.
Perhaps the wine did affect poor papa, if it was bad
wine. I wish men would never drink any. How
much happier they would be.”
“But then there would cease
to be social meetings in England. What should
we do?”
“I know that is a sneer; and
you were nearly as enthusiastic as I was on board
the vessel,” Annette said, sadly.
“Quite true. I was.
But see what quaint creatures we have about us!
Tinman practicing in his Court suit before the chiwal-glass!
And that good fellow, the carpenter, Crickledon, who
has lived with the sea fronting him all his life,
and has never been in a boat, and he confesses he
has only once gone inland, and has never seen an acorn!”
“I wish I could see one of
a real English oak,” said Annette.
“And after being in England
a few months you will be sighing for the Continent.”
“Never!”
“You think you will be quite contented here?”
“I am sure I shall be.
May papa and I never be exiles again! I did not
feel it when I was three years old, going out to Australia;
but it would be like death to me now. Oh!”
Annette shivered, as with the exile’s chill.
“On my honour,” said Mr.
Fellingham, as softly as he could with the wind in
his teeth, “I love the old country ten times
more from your love of it.”
“That is not how I want England
to be loved,” returned Annette.
“The love is in your hands.”
She seemed indifferent on hearing it.
He should have seen that the way to
woo her was to humour her prepossession by another
passion. He could feel that it ennobled her in
the abstract, but a latent spite at Tinman on account
of his wine, to which he continued angrily to attribute
as unwonted dizziness of the head and slight irascibility,
made him urgent in his desire that she should separate
herself from Tinman and his sister by the sharp division
of derision.
Annette declined to laugh at the most
risible caricatures of Tinman. In her antagonism
she forced her simplicity so far as to say that she
did not think him absurd. And supposing Mr. Tinman
to have proposed to the titled widow, Lady Ray, as
she had heard, and to other ladies young and middle-aged
in the neighbourhood, why should he not, if he wished
to marry? If he was economical, surely he had
a right to manage his own affairs. Her dread
was lest Mr. Tinman and her father should quarrel
over the payment for the broken chiwal-glass:
that she honestly admitted, and Fellingham was so
indiscreet as to roar aloud, not so very cordially.
Annette thought him unkindly satirical;
and his thoughts of her reduced her to the condition
of a commonplace girl with expressive eyes.
She had to return to her father.
Mr. Fellingham took a walk on the springy turf along
the cliffs; and “certainly she is a commonplace
girl,” he began by reflecting; with a side eye
at the fact that his meditations were excited by Tinman’s
poisoning of his bile. “A girl who can’t
see the absurdity of Tinman must be destitute of common
intelligence.” After a while he sniffed
the fine sharp air of mingled earth and sea delightedly,
and he strode back to the town late in the afternoon,
laughing at himself in scorn of his wretched susceptibility
to bilious impressions, and really all but hating Tinman
as the cause of his weakness in the manner
of the criminal hating the detective, perhaps.
He cast it altogether on Tinman that Annette’s
complexion of character had become discoloured to
his mind; for, in spite of the physical freshness
with which he returned to her society, he was incapable
of throwing off the idea of her being commonplace;
and it was with regret that he acknowledged he had
gained from his walk only a higher opinion of himself.
Her father was the victim of a sick
headache, [Migraine D.W.]and lay, a groaning
man, on his bed, ministered to by Mrs. Crickledon chiefly.
Annette had to conduct the business with Mr. Phippun
and Mr. Tinman as to payment for the chiwal-glass.
She was commissioned to offer half the price for the
glass on her father’s part; more he would not
pay. Tinman and Phippun sat with her in Crickledon’s
cottage, and Mrs. Crickledon brought down two messages
from her invalid, each positive, to the effect that
he would fight with all the arms of English law rather
than yield his point.
Tinman declared it to be quite out
of the question that he should pay a penny. Phippun
vowed that from one or the other of them he would have
the money.
Annette naturally was in deep distress,
and Fellingham postponed the discussion to the morrow.
Even after such a taste of Tinman
as that, Annette could not be induced to join in deriding
him privately. She looked pained by Mr. Fellingham’s
cruel jests. It was monstrous, Fellingham considered,
that he should draw on himself a second reprimand
from Van Diemen Smith, while they were consulting
in entire agreement upon the case of the chiwal-glass.
“I must tell you this, mister
sir,” said Van Diemen, “I like you, but
I’ll be straightforward and truthful, or I’m
not worthy the name of Englishman; and I do like you,
or I should n’t have given you leave to come
down here after us two. You must respect my friend
if you care for my respect. That’s it.
There it is. Now you know my conditions.”
“I ’m afraid I can’t sign the treaty,”
said Fellingham.
“Here’s more,” said
Van Diemen. “I’m a chilly man myself
if I hear a laugh and think I know the aim of it.
I’ll meet what you like except scorn. I
can’t stand contempt. So I feel for another.
And now you know.”
“It puts a stopper on the play
of fancy, and checks the throwing off of steam,”
Fellingham remonstrated. “I promise to do
my best, but of all the men I’ve ever met in
my life Tinman! the ridiculous!
Pray pardon me; but the donkey and his looking-glass!
The glass was misty! He as particular
about his reflection in the glass as a poet with his
verses! Advance, retire, bow; and such murder
of the Queen’s English in the very presence!
If I thought he was going to take his wine with him,
I’d have him arrested for high treason.”
“You’ve chosen, and you
know what you best like,” said Van Diemen, pointing
his accents by which is produced the awkward
pause, the pitfall of conversation, and sometimes
of amity.
Thus it happened that Mr. Herbert
Fellingham journeyed back to London a day earlier
than he had intended, and without saying what he meant
to say.