A DISSOLUTION OF PARTNERSHIP.

I.

My wife and I would have been more than human if we had not occasionally cast a curious eye upon the relations of Robin and the Twins.

Of Robin's attitude towards that pair of charmers Kitty could make little and I nothing. He kept his place and went his own way—rather ostentatiously, I thought—and appeared if anything to avoid them. If he found himself in their company he treated them with a certain grave reticence—he soon grew out of his fondness for addressing us like a public meeting—and made little attempt to bestow upon them the attentions which young maidens are accustomed to receive from young men.

There was no mystery about the Twins' attitude towards Robin. "Here," said they in effect, "is a fine upstanding young man, full of promise, but hampered in every direction by abysmal ignorance on matters of vital importance. His instincts are sound, but at present he is quite impossible. What he wants is mothering."

And so they mothered him, most maternally. They exerted themselves quite strenuously to instil into him the fundamental principles of life—the correct method of tying a dress tie; the intricate ritual which governs such things as visiting-cards and asparagus; the exact limit of the domains of brown boots and dinner-jackets; the utter criminality of dickeys, turn-down collars, and side-whiskers; and the superiority of dialogue to monologue as a concomitant to afternoon tea.

In many respects, they discovered with pleased surprise, their pupil required no instruction or surveillance. For instance, he could always be trusted to enter or leave a room without awkwardness, and his manner of address was perfect. He was neither servile nor familiar, and the only people to whom I ever saw him pay marked deference were the members of what is after all the only real and natural aristocracy in the world—that of old age.

All their ministrations Robin received with grave wonder—he was not of the sort that can easily magnify a fetish into a deity—but, evidently struck by the intense importance attached by the Twins to their own doctrines, he showed himself a most amenable pupil. Probably he realised, in spite of hereditary preference for inward worth as opposed to outward show, that though a coat cannot make a man, a good man in a good coat often has the advantage of a good man in a bad coat. So he allowed the Twins to round off his corners; and, without losing any of his original ruggedness of character or toughness of fibre, he soon developed into a well-groomed and sufficiently presentable adjunct—quite distinguished-looking, Dilly said, when she met us one day on our way down to the House—to a lady's morning walk.

What he really thought of it all I do not know. I have a kind of suspicion that deep down in his heart every Scot entertains a contempt for the volatile and frivolous English which is only equalled by that of the English for the nation to whom I once heard a Highland minister refer as "the giddy and godless French"; but Robin was not given to the revelation of his private thoughts. He seldom spoke of the Twins to me—he was a discusser of manners rather than men—but he once remarked that they were girls of widely different character. He entered into no further details, but I remember being struck by the observation at the time; for I had always regarded my sisters-in-law as being as identical in disposition as they were in appearance.

Still it was pretty to see Robin unbending to please the two girls, and to hear him say "No, really?" or "My word, what rot!" when you knew that his tongue was itching to cry, "Is that a fact?" or "Hoots!" or "Havers!" as the occasion demanded.

He also possessed the great and unique merit of not being ashamed to ask for guidance in a difficulty. I have known him pause before an unfamiliar dish at table and ask one of his preceptresses, in the frankest manner possible, whether the exigencies of the situation called for a spoon or a fork: and out of doors it was a perpetual joy to hear him whisper, on the approach of some one whom he thought might be a friend of ours, "Will I lift my hat?"

All that year Robin was my right hand. It was a long session; and as my Chief sat in the Upper House, much work in the way of answering questions and making statements fell upon me. We had a good working majority, but the Opposition were a united and well-organised body that year, and we had to rise early and go to bed late to keep their assaults at bay while proceeding with the programme of the session. Every afternoon, before I entered the House to take my place at question-time, my secretary insisted on taking me through the answers which he had prepared for my recitation; and we also discussed the line of action to be pursued if I were cornered by questions of the "arising-out-of-that-answer" order.

Personally, I loathed this part of the work—I am a departmentalist pure and simple—but Robin's eye used to glow with the light of battle as he rehearsed me in the undoubtedly telling counters with which I was to pulverise the foe.

"I would like fine," he once said to me, "to stand up in your place and answer these questions for you."

"I wish you could, Robin," I sighed. "And," I added, "I believe you will some day."

Robin turned pink, for the first time in our acquaintance, and I heard his teeth click suddenly together.

So the wind lay that way!

II.

During the next year my household was furnished with three surprises, Dilly contributing one and Robin two.

Robin's came first. One was his uncle, the other his book.

One night it fell to my lot to dine in the City, as the guest of the Honourable Company of Tile-Glazers and Mortar-Mixers. As I swam forlornly through a turgid ocean of turtle-soup and clarified punch towards an unyielding continent of fish, irrigated by brown sherry, mechanically rehearsing to myself the series of sparkling yet statesmanlike epigrams with which I proposed to reply to the toast of his Majesty's Ministers I became aware that the gentleman on my left was addressing me in a voice that seemed vaguely familiar.

"And how is my brother's second boy doing with you, Mr Inglethwaite?"

I must have looked a trifle blank, for he added—

"My nephew, Robin."

I glanced obliquely at the card which marked his place at table, and read—

Sir James Fordyce.

Then I began to grasp the situation, and I realised that this great man, whose name was honourably known wherever the ills of childhood are combated, was Robin's uncle, the "doctor" to whom my secretary had casually referred, and whom he occasionally went to visit on Sunday afternoons. I had pictured an overdriven G.P., living in Bloomsbury or Balham, with a black bag, and a bulge in his hat where he kept his stethoscope. A man sufficiently distinguished to represent his profession at a public banquet was more than I had bargained for.

We became friends at once, and supported each other, so to speak, amid the multitude of dinners and dishes, our respective neighbours proving but broken reeds so far as social intercourse was concerned. On Sir James's left, I remember, sat a plethoric gentleman whose burnished countenance gave him the appearance of a sort of incarnate Glazed Tile; while my right-hand neighbour, from the manner in which he manipulated the food upon his plate, I put down without hesitation as a Mortar Mixer of high standing.

The old gentleman gave me a good deal of information about Robin.

"He had a hard fight his first year or two in London," he said. "I could see by the way he fell upon his dinner when he came to my house that his meat and drink were not easily come by. Still, now that he has won through, he will not regret the experience. I had it myself. It is the finest training that a young man can receive. Hard, terribly hard, but invaluable! You will not have seen his father yet—my brother John?"

I told him no.

"Well, try and meet him. You, as an Englishman, would perhaps call him hard and narrow,—after forty years of London I sometimes find him so myself,—but he is a fine man, and he has a good wife. So have you," he added unexpectedly—"Robin has told me that."

I laughed, in what the Twins call the "silly little gratified way" which obtrudes itself into my demeanour when any one praises Kitty.

"I hope you are in the same happy situation," I said.

"No, I am a bachelor. My brother John has not achieved a K.C.B., but he is a more fortunate man than I."

The conversation dropped here, but I repeated it to my wife afterwards.

"Of course, the whole thing is as clear as daylight," she said. "These two brothers both wanted to marry the same girl. She took the farmer one, so the other, poor thing, went off to London and became a famous doctor instead. That's all. He might have been Robin's father, but he's only his uncle."

Happy the mind which can reconstruct a romance out of such scanty material.

Sir James ultimately dined at my house, and became a firm friend of all that dwelt therein, especially Phillis.

Then came Robin's second surprise—his book. It was a novel, and a very good novel too. He had been at it for some time, he told me, but it was only recently that he had contrived to finish it off. Being distrustful of its merits, he had decided to offer it to just one good publisher, who could take it or leave it. If he took it, well and good. But if the publisher (and possibly just one other) exhibited an attitude of aloofness, Robin had fully decided not to hawk his bantling about among other less reputable and more amenable firms, but to consign it to his bedroom fire.

However, this inhuman but only-too-unusual sacrifice of the parental instinct was averted by the one good publisher, who accepted the book, and introduced Robin to the public.

Either through shyness or indifference Robin had told us nothing of the approaching interesting event, and it was not until one morning in October, when a parcel of complimentary copies arrived from the publisher's, that we were apprised of the fact that we had been cherishing an author in our midst. Robin solemnly presented us with a copy apiece (which I thought handsome but extravagant), and also sent one to his parents, who, though I think they rather doubted the propriety of possessing a son who wrote novels at all, wrote back comparing it very favourably with The Pilgrim's Progress, the only other work of fiction with which they were acquainted.

The book itself dealt with matters rather than men, and with men rather than women; which was characteristic of its author, but rather irritating for the Twins. It had a good deal to say about the under-side of journalism,—graphic and convincing, all this,—and contained a rather technical but absorbingly interesting account of some most exciting financial operations, winding up with a great description of a panic on the Stock Exchange. But there were few light and no tender passages, from which it will be seen that Robin as an author appealed to the male rather than the female intellect.

The Twins, I think, were secretly rather disappointed with the book, less from any particular fondness for the perusal of love-passages than from a truly human desire to note how Robin would have handled them; for it is always interesting to see to what extent our friends will give themselves away when they commit the indiscretion of a book. On this occasion Robin had been exasperatingly self-contained.

But life is full of compensations. There was a dedication. It read:—

THIS BOOK
OWES ITS INCEPTION,
AND IS THEREFORE
DEDICATED,
TO
A CIRCUMSTANCE
OVER
WHOM
I HAVE NO CONTROL.
R. C. F.

Now it is obvious that in nine cases out of ten there is only one circumstance over whom a vigorous young man has no control, and this circumstance wears petticoats. Hitherto I had not seriously connected Robin with the tender passion, and this sudden intimation that the most serious-minded and ambitious of young men is not immune from the same rather startled me.

The female members of my establishment were pleasantly fluttered, though they were concerned less with the lady's existence than with her identity.

"Who do you think she is?" inquired Kitty of me, the first time the subject cropped up between us.

"Don't know, I'm sure," I murmured. I was smoking my post-prandial cigar at the time, at peace with all the world. "Never had the privilege of seeing his visiting-list."

"I wonder who she can be," continued my wife. "He—he hasn't said anything to you, has he, dear?" she inquired, in a tentative voice.

I slowly opened one of my hitherto closed eyes, and cocked it suspiciously at the diplomatist sitting opposite to me. (The Twins and Robin were out at the theatre.) Then, observing that she was stealthily regarding me through her eyelashes—a detestable trick which some women have—I solemnly agitated my eyelid some three or four times and gently closed it again.

"Has he confided any of his love affairs to you, I mean?" continued Kitty, quite unabashed.

"If you eat any more chocolates you will make yourself sick," I observed.

"Yes, dear," said my wife submissively, pushing away the bon-bon dish. "But has he?"

"Are you trying to pump me?"

"Oh, gracious, no! What would be the good? I only asked a plain question. You men are such creatures for screening each other, though, that it's never any use asking a man anything about another man."

"True for you. As a matter of fact, Robin has hardly said a word to me on the subject of women since first I met him."

Kitty thoughtfully cracked a filbert with her teeth—an unladylike habit about which I have often spoken to her—and said—

"What exciting chats you must have!" Then she added reflectively—

"I expect it's a girl in Scotland. A sort of Highland lassie, in a kilt, or whatever female Highlanders wear."

"Why should a novel about the Stock Exchange 'owe its inception' to a Highland lassie?"

Kitty took another filbert.

"That's 'vurry bright' of you, Adrian, as that American girl used to say. There's something in that. (Yes, I know you don't like it, dear, but I love doing it. I'll pour you out another glass of port. There!) But any idiotic excuse is good enough for a man in love. Has he ever been sentimental with you—quoted poetry, or anything?"

"N-no. Stop, though! He did once quote Burns to me, but that was à propos of poetry in general, not of love-making."

I remembered the incident well. Robin had picked up at a bookstall a copy of an early and quite valuable edition of Burns' poems. He had sat smoking with me in the library late the same night, turning over the pages of the tattered volume, and quoting bits, in broad vernacular, from "Tam o' Shanter" and "The Cottar's Saturday Night." Suddenly he began, almost to himself—

"O, my love is like a red, red rose,

That's newly sprung in June;

My love is like a melody

That's sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in love am I——"

He broke off for a moment, and I remembered how he glowered ecstatically into the fire. Then he concluded—

"And I will love thee still, my dear,

Till a' the seas gang dry."

"Man," he said, "that's fine! That's poetry. That's the real thing!"

I had agreed. It is no use arguing with a Scot about Burns. (I remember once being nearly dirked at a Caledonian Dinner because I ventured to remark that "before ye" was not in my opinion a good rhyme to "Loch Lomond.")

However, Kitty and I were unable to decide whether Robin's "bonnie lass" on that occasion had been a personality or an abstraction.

"Mightn't it be one of the Twins?" I remarked.

"Well, it might be," admitted Kitty judicially, "but he has kept it very close if it is. No," she continued more decidedly, "I don't think it can be. They are quite out of his line. Besides—it would be too absurd!"

It was not one Twin at any rate, for a fortnight later Dilly sprung upon us the third surprise of the series I have mentioned. She announced that she had decided to marry Dicky Lever.

There was, I suppose, nothing very surprising in that. Dicky had been in constant attendance upon the Twins for nearly two years, and had long since graduated into the ranks of the Good Sorts. The surprise to us—rather unreasonably, perhaps—lay in the fact of—

I was so accustomed to seeing my sisters-in-law compassed about by a cloud of young men who appeared to admire them both equally, and to whom they appeared to apportion their favours with indiscriminate camaraderie, that the idea of one admirer stealing a march on all the others seemed a little unfair, somehow.

As Dolly remarked, it would break up the firm horribly.

"You see," she confided to me rather plaintively, "Dilly will have no use for them now, and they'll have still less use for her—an engaged girl beside other girls is about as exciting as a tapioca-pudding at a Lord Mayor's Banquet—and they will only have me. That won't be half the fun."

"I should have thought that your fun would have been exactly doubled," I said.

"Not a bit. How like a man! Don't you see, the fun used to be in playing them backwards and forwards between our two selves—like ping-pong, you know! It was clinking!"

She sighed regretfully.

"Now I shall either have to avoid men or marry them," she concluded, vaguely but regretfully. "Before, if they got in the way, I could always volley them back to Dilly. Now—one can't play ping-pong all by oneself!"

III.

Dilly's engagement, as is usual under such circumstances, afforded my household many opportunities for airy badinage and innocent merriment.

Dolly always heralded her coming into the billiard-room, where the affianced pair had staked out a claim, by a cough of penetrating severity, and usually entered the room with her features obscured by an open umbrella. On several occasions, too, she impersonated her sister; and once, when Dicky was spending a week-end in the house, was only prevented by the fraction of a second from robbing that incensed damosel of her morning salute.

My share in the proceedings was limited to a single constrained interview with Dicky, at which, feeling extremely rude and inquisitive, I asked him the usual stereotyped questions about his income, prospects, and habits (most of which I knew only too well already), which, being satisfactorily answered, I rang the bell for the Tantalus, and thanked heaven that the Twins were not Triplets. I had indeed suggested that Dilly's nearest and most natural protector was her brother, Master Gerald, and that Dicky should apply not for my consent but his. This motion, however, was negatived without a division. I was sorry, for I think my brother-in-law would have shown himself worthy of the occasion.

My wife received the news of the engagement with all the enthusiasm usually exhibited by a Salvation lassie when a fresh convert is hustled forward to the "saved" bench, and henceforth divided her time between ordering Dilly's trousseau and giving tea-parties, at which the prospective bridegroom was produced and passed round, "as if," to use his own expression, "he were the newest thing in accordion-pleating."

As regards Robin's share in the event, I can only recall one incident. He had been away at Stoneleigh, the largest town in my constituency, on some party business, and when he returned home the engagement had been announced for nearly a week.

"I must go and offer my good wishes to Miss Dilly," he said, after hearing the news. "Do you know where she is, Mrs Inglethwaite?"

"I saw her upstairs a few minutes ago," said Kitty. "Come up, and we'll find her."

We were in the library at the time, and Kitty and Robin left the room together. The rest of the story my wife told me later.

"We went up," she said, "and looked into the drawing-room, where I had last seen Dilly. The room was nearly dark, but she was there, sitting curled up in front of the fire.

"'There she is,' I said. 'Go and say something nice.'

"Well, dear,"—Kitty's face assumed an air of impressive solemnity which makes her absurdly like her daughter—"he stood hesitating a moment, and then walked straight up to her and said—

"'Good afternoon! Can you tell me where your sister is? I want to offer her my good wishes on the great event.'

"It wasn't Dilly at all. It was Dolly! And he was able to distinguish between the two in that dim room. And I couldn't!"

"Oh," said I carelessly, "I expect he noticed she wasn't wearing an engagement-ring."

My wife looked at me and sighed, as over one who would spoil a romance for want of a ha'porth of sentiment. And yet I know she would have been quite scandalised if any one had hinted at tender passages between her sister and my secretary. Women are curious creatures.

[CHAPTER EIGHT.]