“I mean that, without conceding the point, it’s a thesis I’ll not argue.”
“You ought to have been a Jesuit, Loyd. You’d have been a grand fellow in a long black soutane, with little buttons down to the feet, and a skull-cap on your head. I think I see some poor devil coming to you about a ‘cas de conscience,’ and going away sorely puzzled with your reply to him.”
“Don’t come to me with one of yours, Calvert, that’s all,” said Loyd, laughing, as he hurried off.
Like many men who have a strong spirit of banter in them, Calvert was vexed and mortified when his sarcasm did not wound. “If the stag will not run, there can be no pursuit,” and so was it that he now felt angry with Loyd, angry with himself. “I suppose these are the sort of fellows who get on in life. The world likes their quiet subserviency, and their sleek submissiveness. As for me, and the like of me, we are ‘not placed.’ Now for a line to my Cousin Sophy, to know who is the ‘Grainger’ who says she is so well acquainted with us all. Poor Sophy, it was a love affair once between us, and then it came to a quarrel, and out of that we fell into the deeper bitterness of what is called ‘a friendship.’ We never really hated each other till we came to that!”
“Dearest, best of friends,” he began, “in my broken health,
fortunes, and spirits, I came to this place a few weeks ago,
and made, by chance, the acquaintance of an atrocious old
woman called Grainger—Miss or Mrs., I forget which—who is
she, and why does she know us, and call us the ‘dear
Calverts,’ and your house ‘sweet old Rocksley?’ I fancy she
must be a begging-letter impostor, and has a design—it will
be a very abortive one—upon my spare five-pound notes. Tell
me all you know of her, and if you can add a word about her
nieces twain—one pretty, the other prettier—do so.
“Any use in approaching my uncle with a statement of my
distresses—mind, body, and estate? I owe him so much
gratitude that, if he doesn’t want me to be insolvent, he
must help me a little further.
“Is it true you are going to be married? The thought of it
sends a pang through me, of such anguish as I dare not speak
of. Oh dear! oh dear! what a flood of bygones are rushing
upon me, after all my pledges, all my promises! One of
these girls reminded me of your smile; how like, but how
different, Sophy. Do say there’s no truth in the story of
the marriage, and believe me—what your heart will tell you
I have never ceased to be—your devoted
“Harry Calvert.”
“I think that ought to do,” said he, as he read over the letter; “and there’s no peril in it since her marriage is fixed for the end of the month. It is, after all, a cheap luxury to bid for the lot that will certainly be knocked down to another. She’s a nice girl, too, is Sophy, but, like all of us, with a temper of her own.
“I’d like to see her married to Loyd, they’d make each other perfectly miserable.”
With this charitable reflection to turn over in various ways, tracing all the consequences he could imagine might spring from it, he sauntered out for a walk beside the lake.
“This box has just come by the mail from Chiasso,” said his host, pointing to a small parcel, corded and sealed. “It is the box the signora yonder has been searching for these three weeks; it was broken when the diligence upset, and they tied it together as well as they could.”
The writing-desk was indeed that which Miss Grainger had lost on her Rhine journey, and was now about to reach her in a lamentable condition—one hinge torn off the lock strained, and the bottom split from one end to the other.