“Oh, Bell reckons she won’t be of age, and that the match can’t come off these four years, by which time he expects to be so hard up that he must marry somebody; and as there will be plenty of the needful, she will suit his book as well as any other.”
“The young lady, of course, approves?” continued Lewis dreamily, untying a knot in the thong of Leicester’s whip.
“Catch a woman refusing a coronet,” returned Leicester, as he pulled up at a house in Park Crescent so suddenly as almost to throw the bay on his haunches.
“General Grant begs you will walk upstairs, Mr. Leicester. He is engaged at present, but desired me to say he particularly wishes to see you,” was the reply made by a most aristocratic butler to Leicester’s inquiry whether his master was at home. “Keep the bay moving, Tim. Now, Arundel, turn to the right—that’s it,” and suiting the action to the word, Charley the indolent leisurely descended from the cab, and crossing the “marble hall,” lounged up a wide staircase followed by Lewis.
“Silence and solitude,” he continued, opening the door of a large drawing-room handsomely furnished. “I hope they won’t be long before they introduce us to the luncheon-table. Oysters are popularly supposed to give one an appetite; but the natives we demolished at Frere’s last night must have been sadly degenerate, for I declare to you I could scarcely get through my breakfast this morning. Ah! what have we here?—a water-colour landscape in a semi-chaotic condition. Annie has been sketching, as sure as fate. I’ll introduce a few masterly touches and surprise her.” So saying he seated himself at the table and began dabbling with a brush.
“By Jove, I’ve done it now!” he exclaimed in a tone of consternation, after a minute’s pause. “Just look here; I thought I would insert the trunk of a tree in the foreground, and the confounded brush had got red in it, so I have made a thing like a lobster and spoiled the drawing.”
“I think, if you wish, I could turn it into a cow, and so get you out of the scrape,” suggested Lewis, smiling at his companion’s guilty countenance.
“My dear fellow, the very thing,” exclaimed Leicester, hastily rising and thrusting Lewis into his seat; “let’s have a cow, by all means. That’s famous,” he continued, as with a few graphic strokes Lewis converted the red daub into the semblance of an animal. “Bravo! make her an eye—now the horns—what a fascinating quadruped! Where’s the tail to come?”
“You would not see the tail in the position in which the cow is supposed to be lying,” remonstrated Lewis.
“Still, it would make it more natural,” urged Leicester. “As a personal favour, just to oblige me, stretch a point and give her a tail.”