John Tincroft, bachelor and benedict

by George E. Sargent

[CHAPTER XXIII.]

A MONTH OF WONDERS.

CHRISTMAS had come and was gone; it had been gone a month or more, and there had been an unwonted bustle in Tincroft House. The best rooms, usually shut up, had been duly put in order, and for a whole week, fires had been kept burning in them—that is to say, in the great or state parlour facing the south, on the first floor, and the chamber adjoining; and also in another pretty room on the same floor, that had a verandah in front of the French windows which opened upon it. The prospect from this window was chilly enough now, certainly; for the distant plantation on which it looked was bare of foliage, and the meadows which intervened were brown with wintry frosts where they were not white with the contains of the last snowfall; and the tastily laid-out flower garden beneath the window, with which John had taken such pains—for he was fond of flowers—was, like everything else, under the ban of winter. But it was the nicest, "sweetest, darlingest room in the house in spring and summer and autumn," said Sarah; and this one was to be Helen's room—so Sarah had decreed.

John Tincroft had kept to his word. Whatever he had done with the previous chapters of his unfinished work, whether consigned to the Red Sea or elsewhere, he had not written a line since the day when we last fell in with him. He had something better to do, he said; for he had fully determined, then and there, that Walter Wilson and his daughter, on their arrival in England, were to make Tincroft House their home as long as they liked to stay there. For that they would both arrive, he professed to be sure.

"There's nothing like a long sea-voyage," he had said to his wife, "for setting people to rights when their health gets out, of sorts. Your cousin won't die on his way home, bless you," said he, perhaps with more confidence than he really felt; but he was determined to believe in his own prognostications too. "We'll get him down here, and you shall see how soon we shall set him up again."

"You don't know that he will come down here at all, John, if he does get to England alive," said Sarah, meekly. It should be said that this dialogue took place the very day on which Walter's letter was received, when the pair were seated together after their pieless dinner.

"Ah, but he must," said John; "why, where else is he to go? And where is that dear little Helen to go? They have no other friends in England, you see—at their first landing, at least, they won't have; though we must try and make friends between them and Walter's father and mother and all the rest. But this will be a work of time. And when your cousin and his darling girl get out of the ship, they will have nowhere else to go. And that is why I say we must go to London, or wherever else it may be, and see Walter at once, so that he may know he has got a home; and not have to wait, and run the risk of getting ill again in some strange hotel."

"And, besides, Sarah—think. He writes about his small property out there—small, you observe, he distinctly writes 'small'—and of having sold it; and having enough to live upon when he gets to England, and to leave to his Helen when he dies—which, it is to be hoped, he won't do for many a long day. But I will be bound to say that it is little enough he has saved. And my private opinion is that it is not much he will have to live upon when he gets back. For there's the long voyage, and that swallows up a great deal of money. So it will never do to let your cousin sink for want of help. I wonder whether he has kept to his old profession of land-surveying. But that isn't the question now. The first thing is to make him and his Helen comfortable, and get him well again. There will be time enough then to think how we can set him on his legs once more."

This was a long speech for John to make; but he made it. And what is more than can be said of some long speeches—whether delivered at Westminster or elsewhere—the speaker believed in every word he uttered. We know better, of course. We know that Walter Wilson was a rich man. And John's friend, Tom Grigson, had also been told the same thing. But John Tincroft knew nothing about this; for, as I have said, he rarely heard news of any kind; and he had never happened to hear of Sarah's cousin, save that he was married; and he had not seen Grigson for a good many months.

So, in his former fashion (and not an uncommon one with others besides John Tincroft) of arguing upon false premises, he arrived at once at the conclusion that his old rival was coming home in forma pauperis, or something like it; and he was quite ready, you see, to "heap coals of fire upon his head," in the true New Testament fashion; and, for the matter of that, in the Old Testament fashion also.