The Dodd Family Abroad, Vol. I

by Charles James Lever

They say that a good harvest often saves a bad administration; certainly a fine day will frequently avert a domestic broil. Had the morning which followed our debate been a favorable one, the chances are we should have been away to the Seven Mountains, or the village of Konigswinter, or some such place; bad luck would have it that the rain came down in torrents from daybreak, heavy clouds gathered over the Rhine, shutting out the opposite bank from view, so that nothing remained to us but home resources, which is but too often a brief expression for row and recrimination.

Breakfast over, each of us, as if dreading a "call of the House," affected some peculiarly pressing duty that he had to perform. The governor retired to pore over his accounts, and tried to make out that the debit against him in his bankbook was a balance in his favor. My mother retreated to her room to hold a grand inspection of her wardrobe; a species of review that always discovers several desertions, and a vast amount of "unserviceables." Leaving her and Mary Anne in court-martial over Betty Cobb, who, as usual, when brought up for sentence, claimed the right to be sent home, I pass on to Lord George, whose wet days are generally devoted to practising some new "hazard off the cushion," or the investigation of that philosopher's stone, a martingale at Rouge-et-Noir, and I arrive at my own case, which invariably resolves itself into a day of gun and pistol cleaning,—an occupation mysteriously linked with gloomy weather, as though one ought to have everything in readiness to blow his brains out, if the mercury continued to fall.

Mrs. G. had a headache, and Caroline was in pursuit of one over the pages of the "Thirty Years' War." Such was the tableau of the Dodd family on this agreeable day. I don't give myself much up to reflection, Bob. I have always thought that as life is a road to be travelled, one step forward is worth any number in the opposite direction; but I vow to you that, on this occasion, I did begin to ponder a little over the past and the present, with a half-glance at the future. What the governor had said the day before was no more than the truth,—we were living at a tremendous rate. If all belonging to us were sold, the capital would scarcely afford six or seven years of such expenditure. These were serious, if not stunning reflections, and I heartily wished they had occupied any other head than my own.

To you—who have always given your brains their own share of work—thinking is no labor. It's like a gallop to a horse in hard bunting condition, and only serves to keep him in wind; but to me, whose faculties are, so to say, fresh from grass, the fatigue of thought is no trifling infliction. Slow men, I take it, suffer more than your clever fellows on these occasions, since their minds are not suggestive of expedients, and they go on plodding over the same ground, till they make a beaten course in their poor brains, like an old race-ground. Something in this fashion must have occurred to me; for by dint of that dreary morning's rumination, I half made up my mind to emigrate somewhere, and if I did n't exactly know where, the fault lies more in my geography than my spirit of enterprise.

The only book I could lay my hands on likely to give me any information was "Cook's Voyages;" and this, I remembered, was in the governor's room. I at once descended the stairs, and had just reached the little conservatory outside of it, when I caught sight of a woman's dress beneath the thick foliage of the orange-trees. I crept noiselessly onward, and after a very devious series of artful dodges, I detected Mrs. D. playing eavesdropper at the governor's door.

I tried to persuade myself that I was mistaken. I did my best to fancy that she was botanizing or "bouquet" gathering; but no, the stubborn fact would not be denied. There she was, bent down, with ear and eye alternately at the keyhole. Neither the act nor the situation were very dignified, and determining that she should not be detected by any other in this predicament, I kicked down a flower-pot, and, before I had well time to replace it, she was gone.

I 'm quite prepared for the laugh you 'll give, Bob, when I own to you that no sooner had I seen her vanish from the horizon than I deliberately took my place exactly where she had been. Of course, my sense of honor and delicacy suggested that I had no other object in view than to ascertain what it was that bad drawn her to the spot. Any curiosity that possessed me was strictly confined to this.

I accordingly bent my ear to the keyhole, and had just time to recognize Mrs. Gore Hampton's voice, when the noise of chairs being drawn back, and the scuffling sounds of feet, showed that the interview had come to an end. Scarcely a moment was left me to shelter myself among the leaves, when the door opened, "discovering," as stage directions would say, Mr. Dodd and Mrs. Gore Hampton in conversation.

There was really a dramatic look in the situation too. The governor's flowered dressing-gown and velvet skullcap, decorated in front by his up-raised spectacles, like a portcullis over his nose, contrasted so well with the graceful morning robe of Mrs. G., all floating and gauzy, and to which her every gesture imparted some new character of vapory lightness.

"Dear Mr. Dodd," said she, pressing his hand with extreme cordiality, "you have been so very, very kind, I really have no words to express what I feel towards you. I have long felt that I owed you this explanation—I have tried to summon courage for it for weeks past—then I sometimes doubted how you might receive it."