The English have been called a bad-tempered
people, but this is to judge of them by their manifestations;
whereas an examination into causes might prove them
to be no worse tempered than that man is a bad sleeper
who lies in a biting bed. If a sagacious instinct
directs them to discountenance realistic tales, the
realistic tale should justify its appearance by the
discovery of an apology for the tormented souls.
Once they sang madrigals, once they danced on the
green, they revelled in their lusty humours, without
having recourse to the pun for fun, an exhibition
of hundreds of bare legs for jollity, a sentimental
wailing all in the throat for music. Evidence
is procurable that they have been an artificially-reared
people, feeding on the genius of inventors, transposers,
adulterators, instead of the products of nature, for
the last half century; and it is unfair to affirm
of them that they are positively this or that.
They are experiments. They are the sons and victims
of a desperate Energy, alluring by cheapness, satiating
with quantity, that it may mount in the social scale,
at the expense of their tissues. The land is
in a state of fermentation to mount, and the shop,
which has shot half their stars to their social zenith,
is what verily they would scald themselves to wash
themselves free of. Nor is it in any degree a
reprehensible sign that they should fly as from hue
and cry the title of tradesman. It is on the
contrary the spot of sanity, which bids us right cordially
hope. Energy, transferred to the moral sense,
may clear them yet.
Meanwhile this beer, this wine, both
are of a character to have killed more than the tempers
of a less gifted people. Martin Tinman invited
Van Diemen Smith to try the flavour of a wine that,
as he said, he thought of “laying down.”
It has been hinted before of a strange
effect upon the minds of men who knew what they were
going to, when they received an invitation to dine
with Tinman. For the sake of a little social meeting
at any cost, they accepted it; accepted it with a
sigh, midway as by engineering measurement between
prospective and retrospective; as nearly mechanical
as things human may be, like the Mussulman’s
accustomed cry of Kismet. Has it not been related
of the little Jew babe sucking at its mother’s
breast in Jerusalem, that this innocent, long after
the Captivity, would start convulsively, relinquishing
its feast, and indulging in the purest. Hebrew
lamentation of the most tenacious of races, at the
passing sound of a Babylonian or a Ninevite voice?
In some such manner did men, unable to refuse, deep
in what remained to them of nature, listen to Tinman;
and so did Van Diemen, sighing heavily under the operation
of simple animal instinct.
“You seem miserable,”
said Tinman, not oblivious of his design to give his
friend a fright.
“Do I? No, I’m all
right,” Van Diemen replied. “I’m
thinking of alterations at the Hall before Summer,
to accommodate guests if I stay here.”
“I suppose you would not like
to be separated from Annette.”
“Separated? No, I should think I shouldn’t.
Who’d do it?”
“Because I should not like to
leave my good sister Martha all to herself in a house
so near the sea ”
“Why not go to the Crouch, man?”
“Thank you.”
“No thanks needed if you don’t take advantage
of the offer.”
They were at the entrance to Elba,
whither Mr. Tinman was betaking himself to see his
intended. He asked if Annette was at home, and
to his great stupefaction heard that she had gone
to London for a week.
Dissembling the spite aroused within
him, he postponed his very strongly fortified design,
and said, “You must be lonely.”
Van Diemen informed him that it would
be for a night only, as young Fellingham was coming
down to keep him company.
“At six o’clock this evening,
then,” said Tinman. “We’re not
fashionable in Winter.”
“Hang me, if I know when ever
we were!” Van Diemen rejoined.
“Come, though, you’d like
to be. You’ve got your ambition, Philip,
like other men.”
“Respectable and respected that
’s my ambition, Mr. Mart.”
Tinman simpered: “With your wealth!”
“Ay, I ’m rich for a contented
mind.”
“I ’m pretty sure you
’ll approve my new vintage,” said Tinman.
“It’s direct from Oporto, my wine-merchant
tells me, on his word.”
“What’s the price?”
“No, no, no. Try it first. It’s
rather a stiff price.”
Van Diemen was partially reassured
by the announcement. “What do you call
a stiff price?”
“Well! over thirty.”
“Double that, and you may have a chance.”
“Now,” cried Tinman, exasperated,
“how can a man from Australia know anything
about prices for port? You can’t divest
your ideas of diggers’ prices. You’re
like an intoxicating drink yourself on the tradesmen
of our town. You think it fine ha!
ha! I daresay, Philip, I should be doing the
same if I were up to your mark at my banker’s.
We can’t all of us be lords, nor baronets.”
Catching up his temper thus cleverly,
he curbed that habitual runaway, and retired from
his old friend’s presence to explode in the society
of the solitary Martha.
Annette’s behaviour was as bitterly
criticized by the sister as by the brother.
“She has gone to those Fellingham
people; and she may be thinking of jilting us,”
Mrs. Cavely said.
“In that case, I have no mercy,”
cried her brother. “I have borne” he
bowed with a professional spiritual humility “as
I should, but it may get past endurance. I say
I have borne enough; and if the worst comes to the
worst, and I hand him over to the authorities I
say I mean him no harm, but he has struck me.
He beat me as a boy and he has struck me as a man,
and I say I have no thought of revenge, but I cannot
have him here; and I say if I drive him out of the
country back to his Gippsland!”
Martin Tinman quivered for speech,
probably for that which feedeth speech, as is the
way with angry men.
“And what? what then?”
said Martha, with the tender mellifluousness of sisterly
reproach. “What good can you expect of letting
temper get the better of you, dear?”
Tinman did not enjoy her recent turn
for usurping the lead in their consultations, and
he said, tartly, “This good, Martha. We
shall get the Hall at my price, and be Head People
here. Which,” he raised his note, “which
he, a Deserter, has no right to pretend to give himself
out to be. What your feelings may be as an old
inhabitant, I don’t know, but I have always
looked up to the people at Elba Hall, and I say I don’t
like to have a Deserter squandering convict’s
money there with his forty-pound-a-year
cook, and his champagne at seventy a dozen. It’s
the luxury of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“That does not prevent its being
very nice to dine there,” said Mrs. Cavely;
“and it shall be our table for good if I have
any management.”
“You mean me, ma’am,” bellowed Tinman.
“Not at all,” she breathed,
in dulcet contrast. “You are good-looking,
Martin, but you have not half such pretty eyes as the
person I mean. I never ventured to dream of managing
you, Martin. I am thinking of the people at Elba.”
“But why this extraordinary treatment of me,
Martha?”
“She’s a child, having
her head turned by those Fellinghams. But she’s
honourable; she has sworn to me she would be honourable.”
“You do think I may as well
give him a fright?” Tinman inquired hungrily.
“A sort of hint; but very gentle,
Martin. Do be gentle casual like as
if you did n’t want to say it. Get him on
his Gippsland. Then if he brings you to words,
you can always laugh back, and say you will go to
Kew and see the Fernery, and fancy all that, so high,
on Helvellyn or the Downs. Why” Mrs.
Cavely, at the end of her astute advices and cautionings,
as usual, gave loose to her natural character “Why
that man came back to England at all, with his boastings
of Gippsland, I can’t for the life of me find
out. It ’s a perfect mystery.”
“It is,” Tinman sounded
his voice at a great depth, reflectively. Glad
of taking the part she was perpetually assuming of
late, he put out his hand and said: “But
it may have been ordained for our good, Martha.”
“True, dear,” said she,
with an earnest sentiment of thankfulness to the Power
which had led him round to her way of thinking and
feeling.