CHAPTER XXIV.—A STORM BREWING.
“H arry! My dear Harry!—Wilkins, where is your master? I told you I must speak to him before he went out, and now you’ve let him go without——”
“Wilkins! where the d——— Oh! Wilkins, what did you do with that bag of snipe-shot I brought down from London?”
Thus apostrophised by an agitated soprano at the drawing-room door, and an impatient tenore robusto in the entrance-hall, Wilkins, the amiable and timid London butler, who had played the character of Job’s comforter to Alice’s Didone abandonata on the memorable evening of the first of September, made two or three steps in the direction of the drawing-room, then twisting round with a sudden jerk, as though he had been worked by machinery with which somebody was playing tricks, rushed frantically into the hall, and handing his master a wrong bag of shot exclaimed, without any breath left—
“This—a—is them, sir; and my mistress—a—says——”
“Swan-shot, you fool—that is, Wilkins, big enough to roll over a bullock! It’s the snipe-shot I’m looking for. No, not that. Don’t you know snipe-shot when you see it? When the scent’s getting duller every minute, too! I ought to have been out these two hours. That’s right, my good fellow: don’t be a month about it—give it me. I shall be home to dinner.”
“But my mistress particularly wishes to speak——” faltered poor Wilkins. Harry, flinging down with an angry gesture the shot-belt he had just filled, and muttering that he had better give up going out at all, strode off to the drawing-room, and putting his head in through the partially opened door, as though he were afraid of being taken prisoner if he trusted himself bodily in the apartment, exclaimed—
“How, then, little woman, what is it? Quick, please, for I want to be off.”
“There is an invitation just arrived from Allerton House for Tuesday week. What am I to say?”
“Oh, we must go, of course. I want you to get intimate with Lady Allerton, she’s a charming woman, and Lord George is a good little fellow in his way, though an awfully bad shot. Dinner, I suppose?”
“Yes; but, Harry, wait one moment and listen to me!” exclaimed Alice. “You need not be in such a hurry; you will have plenty of time for that horrid shooting before six o’clock.”
“Horrid shooting, indeed! Much you know about it,” muttered the victimised sportsman, inwardly chafing at the delay; “it will be horrid shooting in one sense, if I am hindered much longer. The scent won’t lie when the dew is off, and I may as well go out with a walking-stick as with a gun, for there will be nothing to shoot at.”
“Well, I’ll let you go directly, you impatient, silly boy,” returned Alice, smiling at the serious, business-like view her husband took of his amusement. “The only thing I wish to say is, that if we accept this invitation, we shall be almost certain to meet the Duke and Duchess of Brentwood there; and you know I’ve been waiting for you to go with me, day after day, and I’ve never returned their visit yet. You must take me to call before Tuesday week; I’ve been quite rude already.”
“All right,” returned Harry; “we’ll go in style, and call on the old duchess. I’ll wear a red coat, and stick a peacock’s feather in my hat, if that will please you. It’s a pity she’s so like a Chimpanzee! Most probably she is related to the monkey tribe—suppose we ask her when we call; it will be a new and original style of conversation, eh? Well, ta ta! It’s so late now that I’m afraid you won’t have the felicity of seeing me again till dinner-time;” and without allowing his wife an opportunity of remonstrating, Harry closed the door, and was soon paying off the long-bills in a way in which they scarcely approved of having their “little accounts” settled. Alice watched him depart with a smile, which faded into a sigh as she turned to write an acceptance to the dinner invitation, and then employ and amuse herself as best she might, during the weary hours which must elapse ere her husband would return.
Lord Allerton was the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of Brentwood, who were the great people, par excellence, of the Coverdale Park neighbourhood; and when the Duke and Duchess came to spend their Christmas in the country, Alice, stimulated thereunto by the conversation of the Mesdames Jones, Brown, and Robinson of those parts, felt slightly curious to know whether these ancient and venerable limbs of the aristocracy would deign to honour her by a call, and was proportionably gratified and bored when, on a dreary morning, the dull old Duchess came and paid her a singularly heavy and uninteresting visit. To induce Harry to accompany her when she returned this equally flattering and alarming civility, had been for several days the sole object of Alice’s existence,—an object in which, as the reader may perceive by the foregoing conversation, she had hitherto been unsuccessful.
The next morning Alice once again made an attempt to entice her better half away from the pleasures of the plains; but the rabbits had begun barking the young ash-trees in a favourite plantation, and were to be “pulled down” accordingly. This occupation lasted several days; at the expiration of which period certain poachers, choosing to join in the amusement uninvited, had to be “pulled up” for their iniquities—a series of ups and downs which left only two days vacant before the important Tuesday dedicated to the dinner-party at Allerton would arrive. The first of these days it rained cats and dogs, and snowed fragments of polar bears so decidedly, that even Harry could not get out till about half-past three, when, in desperation, he enveloped himself in a Macintosh, and galloped over to the town, five miles off (as all towns are from all country houses), to match some ribbon for Alice, and look at the newspaper on his own account. The County Press was just out, and therein Harry perceived a leading article attacking the decision arrived at by himself and his brother magistrates in the case of the “pulled up” poachers. This being equally irritating and interesting, he sat down in the reading-room of the library diligently to peruse the same—phsa-ing, pish-ing, and “confounding the fellow” at every second line. He had just got to a paragraph beginning, “Mr. C—d—le may be well qualified to lead the way across a stiff line of country after the hounds, or roll over unoffending hares and rabbits in a battue—but that is no proof that he possesses an equal right to ride rough-shod over the enactments of a British Parliament, or to overturn the decrees of abler lawyers than are to be found among the bench of magistrates at H————,” when a large hand was placed over his eyes, and a loud, jovial voice exclaimed—
“Never mind, Harry, my boy—little Flipkins the editor’s got a wife with the devil’s own temper, and she helps him to write the leaders; she took a dislike to you when she was Miss Jamby, and kept the confectioner’s shop, when you neglected her, and flirted with the girl behind the counter, because she happened to be the prettiest, and now she’s paying you off; you can’t horsewhip a woman, you know, so you’d better take it easy.”
Before the speaker had arrived at the conclusion of his advice gratis, Coverdale had removed the hand which impeded his vision, and turning round, exclaimed—
“Why, it’s Tom Rattleworth, by all that’s extraordinary—I thought you were in Canada, with your regiment, man!”
“So I was till the gout carried off the governor, and left me a miserable orphan with £15,000 a-year in my pocket. When that lamentable event occurred I thought I was, for the first time in my life, worth taking care of, so determined to cut the red cloth and pipe-clay business, and come home and live virtuously ever after.”
“You seem to have recovered your spirits pretty well, if one may judge by present appearances,” returned Coverdale, half-amused, half-disgusted at his quondam friend’s sentiments—“at all events you’ve not grown thin upon it.”
“No! but that’s the very fact which proves how deeply I feel my forlorn condition; it’s old Falstaff—is it not—observes how grief swells a man? I don’t ride a pound under twelve stone,” was the rejoinder. “By the way,” continued Rattleworth, “that reminds me—it’s deucedly lucky I met you; you’re the very man that can tell me all about it—Broomfield is anxious to give up the fox-hounds; he is growing old and lazy, and he wants me to take ’em.”
“My dear fellow, I’m delighted to hear it,” exclaimed Harry, eagerly; “old Broomfield is completely past his work, and of all the men I know you’re the fittest to succeed him—you will do the thing as it ought to be done. I should have undertaken them myself, if I had not become a Benedict: Broomfield tried to persuade me.”
“Well now look here,” resumed Rattleworth, meditatively; “I’ve promised to meet Broomfield to-morrow, and take his horses and everything at a valuation. Now there is not a man in the county whose opinion about a horse I’d sooner have than yours; can you spare time to go with me? I shall really consider it a personal favour if you will do so.”
“Of course I will,” returned Harry; for if he had a weak point on which he was accessible to flattery, it was concerning his knowledge of horse-flesh; “there can be nothing I should like better, in fact—what time do you go?”
“I was to lunch with him at one,” was the reply; “and we were to look at his stud afterwards.”
“Then I’ll meet you at the cross roads by Hanger Wood, at half-past twelve,” returned Harry; and so, with a hearty shake of the hand, the friends parted.
Tom Rattleworth was the only son of a man who had begun life as a land-agent and attorney in H—————; but having very early in his career dabbled in stock-jobbing till he made a considerable sum of money, which his business connection enabled him to lay out to great advantage, he grew rich, purchased an estate, married into one of the county families, and brought his son up “as a gentleman”—that is, he sent him to Eton, where he learned nothing but how to get into and out of scrapes; and bought him a commission which he would have done better without. Nature having thus placed a silver spoon in Tom’s mouth, appeared to consider his head sufficiently furnished without going to any unusual expense in the article of brains; so she gave him barely an average quantity, and made up the deficiency by an actual passion for horse-flesh. Thomas, thus endowed, was the schoolfellow and holiday associate of Harry Coverdale; and having one, and only one taste in common, they had kept up their intimacy, until Harry started on his grand tour, and Tom was sent with his regiment to Canada, since which period the interview we have just described was their first meeting.
As Coverdale cantered home through the mud, and rain, and sleet, it suddenly flashed across him that the next was the only day remaining in which to call on the Duke and Duchess of Brentwood before the dinner at Allerton House; and his conscience smote him as he reflected that the engagement he had formed would prevent him from accompanying Alice; indeed, so annoyed did he feel at this unlucky coincidence, that for a moment he was on the point of turning his horse’s head, and riding after Tom Rattleworth to get off the engagement; but it was growing dusk, and he reflected that Chase Hall, the residence of the renowned Thomas, was so far out of his way that he should be unable to reach home by dinner-time, and then Alice would get frightened about him, which would annoy her more than being obliged to pay her visit alone; so with this bit of sophistry he, for the moment, quieted his conscience. Before he arrived at his own house, he had mentally decided that, as it would only worry his wife, he should say nothing about the Rattleworth engagement to her that evening, and that in the morning he should mention it as an equally unfortunate and unavoidable necessity, and persuade her to pay the first visit without him. Of course she would be a little annoyed just at first, but she was so sweet-tempered and amiable, that—that—and here his reflections refused to clothe themselves in intelligible language;—had they done so honestly, the sentence would have ended thus—“that she would submit without making a scene.” And so he cantered home, where Alice, with her sunny smile and bright loving eyes, was waiting to receive him, and made a vast fuss with the poor dear because he must be so wet, which, thanks to Mr. Macintosh—his admirable invention—he was not in the slightest degree, though he appreciated the affectionate fuss Alice made about him all the same.
Harry! you blind, stupid Harry!—as if her little finger, bless it, were not worth all the horse-flesh that ever was foaled, from Bucephalus, down to the winner of the last Derby.
The next morning was a very fine one. Alice and Harry made their appearance in the breakfast parlour about nine o’clock; each was a little out of sorts. Alice, not having been able to get any air or exercise on the previous day, had waked with a headache, which Harry continually forgetting, would leave the door of his dressing-room open, and attire himself to the tune of “A hunting we will go.” Then a new morning gown, on which Miss Flippery, the dressmaker at H————, had staked her credit, did not fit, and in turning round to look at the set of the back, Alice trod on the skirt, and tore it out of the “gathers”—whatever they may be; and as women seldom swear, and the evil was scarcely serious enough to cry over, poor little Mrs. Coverdale was unable to vent her annoyance, and brought it down to breakfast with her accordingly. Harry, on the other hand, conscious that he was about to commit an act of injustice, on which (although he repented of it sufficiently to feel very uncomfortable) he was still determined, tried to keep up his courage by affecting a degree of hilarity which caused him to make bad jokes about every subject mentioned, and to evince such a total want of sympathy with his wife’s headache and consequent depression of spirits, that Alice for the first time in her life considered him tiresome and in the way, and felt inclined to say sharp things to him and snub him. After a longish pause, interrupted only when, on two occasions, Harry was pulled up for whistling, and a third time for beating the devil’s tattoo on the chimney-piece, Alice began, “Really Wilkins has taken to burning the toast so black, it is impossible to eat it. I wish you would speak to him about it, Harry.”
“Certainly, my love,” was the cheerful reply; “what shall I say to him? That although I approve of his blacking my boots, I disapprove of his blacking my toast, and that I shall thank him to do it brown in future?”
“If you like to risk the chance, which is almost a certainty, that the man will misunderstand you, for the sake of making a stupid slang pun, I advise you to do so,” was the captious reply.
“Phew!” whistled Harry; “how solemn, and sensible, and serious we’ve grown all of a sudden! I beg to inform you, Mrs. Coverdale that I expect my wife to admire my puns, if nobody else does.”
“Then you must contrive to make better ones, and to time them rather more appropriately,” rejoined Alice, so snappishly that her husband looked up in surprise. Recalled to herself by the unmistakeable astonishment depicted on the bright, good-natured countenance of her better half, Alice continued in a milder tone, “You must not mind what I say this morning, Harry, dear; my headache makes me so dreadfully cross and stupid.”
“Poor little thing! you were shut up all yesterday, you know, and that is enough to give anybody a headache,” returned Harry, who considered houses were built only to dine and sleep in, and would have had Alice spend her days al fresco, even as he delighted to do. “You must go out as much as possible to-day; luckily it is very fine.”
“Yes; and I am to be honoured with my husband’s company too, which is a most unaccustomed pleasure,” rejoined Alice, brightening up at the recollection. “It is certainly very good policy to make yourself so scarce, though I wish you did not adhere quite so strictly to it; why you have not driven out with me since we returned from Popem Park! At what time do you mean to order the carriage?”
“Why it’s an hour’s drive at least; James had better be at the door by two o’clock,” replied Harry. Then turning towards the fire, and moving the ornaments on the chimney-piece into wrong positions, he continued, with an elaborate attempt at nonchalance, which veiled most inefficiently his consciousness that he was about to perform an act against which his moral sense rebelled, he resumed: “I’m afraid my love that I must ask you to call upon the Duchess of Brentwood without me this morning—a business engagement of—a—importance—that is, one that I cannot avoid, will, I am afraid——”
And here he broke off abruptly, for, glancing at his wife, he perceived an expression in her pretty face that he had never beheld there before; the bright eyes were flashing, the soft cheeks burned, and the coral lips pouted with unmistakeable anger. Harry had at length gone too far, and his sweet-tempered, loving-hearted little wife was positively and seriously angry with him. But so unusual a circumstance demands a fresh chapter.