“Not he,” replied Dick. “The country? Why should he go to the country at this time?”
“Why, he said that you advised him to do so,” cried Elizabeth. “You know what is the only reason he could have for flying from Bath just now. Poor Charlie! he feels that Betsy was not considerate toward him.”
Dick laughed. He had quite forgotten that he had counselled his brother to go away for a time. He had really been more in jest than in earnest in the matter; but Charles had taken him very seriously, and had gone off without an hour’s delay to a farmhouse eight miles out of Bath, on the Wells road. He was not slow to perceive what Dick had hinted at—that a gratifying degree of prominence might be given to his name if the fact became well known that he had been so greatly overcome by the news of Miss Linley’s having promised to marry another man as to make it impossible for him to continue living in the same town with her.
“Poor Charlie!” said the elder Miss Sheridan in a tone that was meant as a reproof to Dick for his levity—“poor Charlie! But we can keep the matter a secret; we need not add to his humiliation, Dick, by talking of his having gone away on account of Betsy’s treatment of him.”
Dick laughed more heartily still.
“My dear girl,” he cried, “your suggestion is well meant, but poor Charlie would not thank you if you were to act on it. Poor Charlie knows perfectly well that he has now got a chance of attaining such fame as may never come to him again so long as he lives. When the fickle Phyllis rejects Strephon’s advances and accepts those of Damon, the Pastoral that commemorates the event confers immortality upon Strephon the rejected, just as surely as if he had been the fortunate lover. I can assure you that Bath, and Oxford too, I doubt not, are just now crowded with Strephons anxious to be handed down to posterity as the rejected swains. Take my word for it, poor Charlie would only be chagrined if he thought that no notice whatever would be taken of his forlorn condition as the rejected swain. Good heavens! wait until Friday comes, and you scan the Poet’s Corner of the Advertiser; if you do not find poor Charlie making a bid for the immortality of the doleful Strephon, I am greatly mistaken.”
The girls stared at him.
“You are wrong—quite wrong, Dick,” cried the elder. “Yes, you are. Charlie begged of us to keep his departure a secret. He said he would not have it known for the world.”
Dick did not laugh again: on the contrary, he became solemn. He felt that it would be heartless on his part to make the attempt to undermine the simplicity of his sisters. But the fact that Charlie had taken such elaborate precautions to give publicity to the news of his departure caused Dick to have a higher opinion than he had up to that moment possessed of his brother’s knowledge of human nature.