One of the most difficult lessons
for spirited young men to learn is, that good jokes
are not always good policy. They have to be paid
for, like good dinners, though dinner and joke shall
seem to have been at somebody else’s expense.
Young Fellingham was treated rudely by Van Diemen
Smith, and with some cold reserve by Annette:
in consequence of which he thought her more than ever
commonplace. He wrote her a letter of playful
remonstrance, followed by one that appealed to her
sentiments.
But she replied to neither of them.
So his visits to Crikswich came to an end.
Shall a girl who has no appreciation
of fun affect us? Her expressive eyes, and her
quaint simplicity, and her enthusiasm for England,
haunted Mr. Fellingham; being conjured up by contrast
with what he met about him. But shall a girl
who would impose upon us the task of holding in our
laughter at Tinman be much regretted? There could
be no companionship between us, Fellingham thought.
On an excursion to the English Lakes
he saw the name of Van Diemen Smith in a visitors’
book, and changed his ideas on the subject of companionship.
Among mountains, or on the sea, or reading history,
Annette was one in a thousand. He happened to
be at a public ball at Helmstone in the Winter season,
and who but Annette herself came whirling before him
on the arm of an officer! Fellingham did not miss
his chance of talking to her. She greeted him
gaily, and speaking with the excitement of the dance
upon her, appeared a stranger to the serious emotions
he was willing to cherish. She had been to the
Lakes and to Scotland. Next summer she was going
to Wales. All her experiences were delicious.
She was insatiable, but satisfied.
“I wish I had been with you,” said Fellingham.
“I wish you had,” said she.
Mrs. Cavely was her chaperon at the
ball, and he was not permitted to enjoy a lengthened
conversation sitting with Annette. What was he
to think of a girl who could be submissive to Mrs.
Cavely, and danced with any number of officers, and
had no idea save of running incessantly over England
in the pursuit of pleasure? Her tone of saying,
“I wish you had,” was that of the most
ordinary of wishes, distinctly, if not designedly
different from his own melodious depth.
She granted him one waltz, and he
talked of her father and his whimsical vagrancies
and feeling he had a positive liking for Van Diemen,
and he sagaciously said so.
Annette’s eyes brightened.
“Then why do you never go to see him? He
has bought Elba. We move into the Hall after
Christmas. We are at the Crouch at present.
Papa will be sure to make you welcome. Do you
not know that he never forgets a friend or breaks
a friendship?”
“I do, and I love him for it,” said Fellingham.
If he was not greatly mistaken a gentle
pressure on the fingers of his left hand rewarded
him.
This determined him. It should
here be observed that he was by birth the superior
of Annette’s parentage, and such is the sentiment
of a better blood that the flattery of her warm touch
was needed for him to overlook the distinction.
Two of his visits to Crikswich resulted
simply in interviews and conversations with Mrs. Crickledon.
Van Diemen and his daughter were in London with Tinman
and Mrs. Cavely, purchasing furniture for Elba Hall.
Mrs. Crickledon had no scruple in saying, that Mrs.
Cavely meant her brother to inhabit the Hall, though
Mr. Smith had outbid him in the purchase. According
to her, Tinman and Mr. Smith had their differences;
for Mr. Smith was a very outspoken gentleman, and had
been known to call Tinman names that no man of spirit
would bear if he was not scheming.
Fellingham returned to London, where
he roamed the streets famous for furniture warehouses,
in the vain hope of encountering the new owner of
Elba.
Failing in this endeavour, he wrote
a love-letter to Annette.
It was her first. She had liked
him. Her manner of thinking she might love him
was through the reflection that no one stood in the
way. The letter opened a world to her, broader
than Great Britain.
Fellingham begged her, if she thought
favourably of him, to prepare her father for the purport
of his visit. If otherwise, she was to interdict
the visit with as little delay as possible and cut
him adrift.
A decided line of conduct was imperative.
Yet you have seen that she was not in love. She
was only not unwilling to be in love. And Fellingham
was just a trifle warmed. Now mark what events
will do to light the fires.
Van Diemen and Tinman, old chums re-united,
and both successful in life, had nevertheless, as
Mrs. Crickledon said, their differences. They
commenced with an opposition to Tinman’s views
regarding the expenditure of town moneys. Tinman
was ever for devoting them to the patriotic defence
of “our shores;” whereas Van Diemen, pointing
in detestation of the town sewerage reeking across
the common under the beach, loudly called on him to
preserve our lives, by way of commencement. Then
Van Diemen precipitately purchased Elba at a high
valuation, and Tinman had expected by waiting to buy
it at his own valuation, and sell it out of friendly
consideration to his friend afterwards, for a friendly
consideration. Van Diemen had joined the hunt.
Tinman could not mount a horse. They had not
quarrelled, but they had snapped about these and other
affairs. Van Diemen fancied Tinman was jealous
of his wealth. Tinman shrewdly suspected Van
Diemen to be contemptuous of his dignity. He
suffered a loss in a loan of money; and instead of
pitying him, Van Diemen had laughed him to scorn for
expecting security for investments at ten per cent.
The bitterness of the pinch to Tinman made him frightfully
sensitive to strictures on his discretion. In
his anguish he told his sister he was ruined, and
she advised him to marry before the crash. She
was aware that he exaggerated, but she repeated her
advice. She went so far as to name the person.
This is known, because she was overheard by her housemaid,
a gossip of Mrs. Crickledon’s, the subsequently
famous “Little Jane.”
Now, Annette had shyly intimated to
her father the nature of Herbert Fellingham’s
letter, at the same time professing a perfect readiness
to submit to his directions; and her father’s
perplexity was very great, for Annette had rather
fervently dramatized the young man’s words at
the ball at Helmstone, which had pleasantly tickled
him, and, besides, he liked the young man. On
the other hand, he did not at all like the prospect
of losing his daughter; and he would have desired her
to be a lady of title. He hinted at her right
to claim a high position. Annette shrank from
the prospect, saying, “Never let me marry one
who might be ashamed of my father!”
“I shouldn’t stomach that,”
said Van Diemen, more disposed in favour of the present
suitor.
Annette was now in a tremor.
She had a lover; he was coming. And if he did
not come, did it matter? Not so very much, except
to her pride. And if he did, what was she to
say to him? She felt like an actress who may
in a few minutes be called on the stage, without knowing
her part. This was painfully unlike love, and
the poor girl feared it would be her conscientious
duty to dismiss him most gently, of course;
and perhaps, should he be impetuous and picturesque,
relent enough to let him hope, and so bring about
a happy postponement of the question. Her father
had been to a neighbouring town on business with Mr.
Tinman. He knocked at her door at midnight; and
she, in dread of she knew not what chiefly
that the Hour of the Scene had somehow struck stepped
out to him trembling. He was alone. She
thought herself the most childish of mortals in supposing
that she could have been summoned at midnight to declare
her sentiments, and hardly noticed his gloomy depression.
He asked her to give him five minutes; then asked
her for a kiss, and told her to go to bed and sleep.
But Annette had seen that a great present affliction
was on him, and she would not be sent to sleep.
She promised to listen patiently, to bear anything,
to be brave. “Is it bad news from home?”
she said, speaking of the old home where she had not
left her heart, and where his money was invested.
“It’s this, my dear Netty,”
said Van Diemen, suffering her to lead him into her
sitting-room; “we shall have to leave the shores
of England.”
“Then we are ruined.”
“We’re not; the rascal
can’t do that. We might be off to the Continent,
or we might go to America; we’ve money.
But we can’t stay here. I’ll not
live at any man’s mercy.”
“The Continent! America!”
exclaimed the enthusiast for England. “Oh,
papa, you love living in England so!”
“Not so much as all that, my
dear. You do, that I know. But I don’t
see how it’s to be managed. Mart Tinman
and I have been at tooth and claw to-day and half
the night; and he has thrown off the mask, or he’s
dashed something from my sight, I don’t know
which. I knocked him down.”
“Papa!”
“I picked him up.”
“Oh,” cried Annette, “has Mr. Tinman
been hurt?”
“He called me a Deserter!”
Anisette shuddered.
She did not know what this thing was,
but the name of it opened a cabinet of horrors, and
she touched her father timidly, to assure him of her
constant love, and a little to reassure herself of
his substantial identity.
“And I am one,” Van Diemen
made the confession at the pitch of his voice.
“I am a Deserter; I’m liable to be branded
on the back. And it’s in Mart Tinman’s
power to have me marched away to-morrow morning in
the sight of Crikswich, and all I can say for myself,
as a man and a Briton, is, I did not desert before
the enemy. That I swear I never would have done.
Death, if death’s in front; but your poor mother
was a handsome woman, my child, and there I
could not go on living in barracks and leaving her
unprotected. I can’t tell a young woman
the tale. A hundred pounds came on me for a legacy,
as plump in my hands out of open heaven, and your
poor mother and I saw our chance; we consulted, and
we determined to risk it, and I got on board with
her and you, and over the seas we went, first to shipwreck,
ultimately to fortune.”
Van Diemen laughed miserably.
“They noticed in the hunting-field here I had
a soldier-like seat. A soldier-like seat it’ll
be, with a brand on it. I sha’n’t
be asked to take a soldier-like seat at any of their
tables again. I may at Mart Tinman’s, out
of pity, after I’ve undergone my punishment.
There’s a year still to run out of the twenty
of my term of service due. He knows it; he’s
been reckoning; he has me. But the worst cat-o’-nine-tails
for me is the disgrace. To have myself pointed
at, ‘There goes the Deserter’ He was a
private in the Carbineers, and he deserted.’
No one’ll say, ’Ay, but he clung to the
idea of his old schoolmate when abroad, and came back
loving him, and trusted him, and was deceived.”
Van Diemen produced a spasmodic cough
with a blow on his chest. Anisette was weeping.
“There, now go to bed,”
said he. “I wish you might have known no
more than you did of our flight when I got you on
board the ship with your poor mother; but you’re
a young woman now, and you must help me to think of
another cut and run, and what baggage we can scrape
together in a jiffy, for I won’t live here at
Mart Tinman’s mercy.”
Drying her eyes to weep again, Annette
said, when she could speak: “Will nothing
quiet him? I was going to bother you with all
sorts of silly questions, poor dear papa; but I see
I can understand if I try. Will nothing Is
he so very angry? Can we not do something to pacify
him? He is fond of money. He oh,
the thought of leaving England! Papa, it will
kill you; you set your whole heart on England.
We could I could could I not,
do you not think? step between you as a
peacemaker. Mr. Tinman is always very courteous
to me.”
At these words of Annette’s,
Van Diemen burst into a short snap of savage laughter.
“But that’s far away in the background,
Mr. Mart Tinman!” he said. “You stick
to your game, I know that; but you’ll find me
flown, though I leave a name to stink like your common
behind me. And,” he added, as a chill reminder,
“that name the name of my benefactor. Poor
old Van Diemen! He thought it a safe bequest to
make.”
“It was; it is! We will
stay; we will not be exiled,” said Annette.
“I will do anything. What was the quarrel
about, papa?”
“The fact is, my dear, I just
wanted to show him and take down his pride I’m
by my Australian education a shrewder hand than his
old country. I bought the house on the beach
while he was chaffering, and then I sold it him at
a rise when the town was looking up only
to make him see. Then he burst up about something
I said of Australia. I will have the common clean.
Let him live at the Crouch as my tenant if he finds
the house on the beach in danger.”
“Papa, I am sure,” Annette
repeated “sure I have influence with
Mr. Tinman.”
“There are those lips of yours
shutting tight,” said her father. “Just
listen, and they make a big O. The donkey! He
owns you’ve got influence, and he offers he’ll
be silent if you’ll pledge your word to marry
him. I’m not sure he didn’t say,
within the year. I told him to look sharp not
to be knocked down again. Mart Tinman for my son-in-law!
That’s an upside down of my expectations, as
good as being at the antipodes without a second voyage
back! I let him know you were engaged.”
Annette gazed at her father open-mouthed,
as he had predicted; now with a little chilly dimple
at one corner of the mouth, now at another as
a breeze curves the leaden winter lake here and there.
She could not get his meaning into her sight, and
she sought, by looking hard, to understand it better;
much as when some solitary maiden lady, passing into
her bedchamber in the hours of darkness, beholds tradition
telling us she has absolutely beheld foot of burglar
under bed; and lo! she stares, and, cunningly to moderate
her horror, doubts, yet cannot but believe that there
is a leg, and a trunk, and a head, and two terrible
arms, bearing pistols, to follow. Sick, she palpitates;
she compresses her trepidation; she coughs, perchance
she sings a bar or two of an aria. Glancing down
again, thrice horrible to her is it to discover that
there is no foot! For had it remained, it might
have been imagined a harmless, empty boot. But
the withdrawal has a deadly significance of animal
life....
In like manner our stricken Annette
perceived the object; so did she gradually apprehend
the fact of her being asked for Tinman’s bride,
and she could not think it credible. She half
scented, she devised her plan of escape from another
single mention of it. But on her father’s
remarking, with a shuffle, frightened by her countenance,
“Don’t listen to what I said, Netty.
I won’t paint him blacker than he is” then
Annette was sure she had been proposed for by Mr. Tinman,
and she fancied her father might have revolved it
in his mind that there was this means of keeping Tinman
silent, silent for ever, in his own interests.
“It was not true, when you told
Mr. Tinman I was engaged, papa,” she said.
“No, I know that. Mart
Tinman only half-kind of hinted. Come, I say!
Where’s the unmarried man wouldn’t like
to have a girl like you, Netty! They say he’s
been rejected all round a circuit of fifteen miles;
and he’s not bad-looking, neither he
looks fresh and fair. But I thought it as well
to let him know he might get me at a disadvantage,
but he couldn’t you. Now, don’t think
about it, my love.”
“Not if it is not necessary,
papa,” said Annette; and employed her familiar
sweetness in persuading him to go to bed, as though
he were the afflicted one requiring to be petted.