CHAPTER XXII.
MR. JABEZ DISSEMBLES.
La! Mr. Jabez, what a time it is since you called!’ said Mrs. Turvey, with a toss of the head that sent her cap awry.
Mr. Jabez, who had come to see Mr. Egerton on behalf of the firm, and was thus apostrophized in the hall by ‘the guardian angel of the house’ (the title Mr. Duck had himself conferred on her in a poetic flight), felt very uncomfortable. He shone still, but very weakly; his shine was like the second-hand business that the sun indulges in between a snow and a thunderstorm on a modern midsummer day. He stammered out something about business, and went very hot and red, and was intensely relieved when Mr. Egerton called over the bannisters to him.
‘Come up, Duck,’ said Mr. Egerton; and Duck did go up, two stairs at a time.
Mrs. Turvey looked after him.
‘So, Mr. Jabez Duck,’ she muttered, ‘you’re too busy to call, are you?—and you haven’t a word to say for yourself. A pretty fine thing, indeed, after coming here to tea week after week, and me a-buying muffins and Sally Lungs, and delicacies no end for you, and then to be treated like this. But you’ve got hold of the wrong sort, Mr. Jabez Duck. I can tell you. I ain’t one o’ them slips o’ gals as is to be made a fool of, and played fast and loose with.’
It was, perhaps, hardly necessary for Mrs. Turvey to state that she was not a slip of a girl. No one could have brought such an accusation against her.
To tell the truth, the love affairs of Jabez and Susan had not progressed lately so satisfactorily as could be wished by the lady. Up to the time of Mr. Egerton’s sudden reappearance in the land of the living, Jabez had been most assiduous. The wooing, it is true, had not been very long or very romantic—they were past the age of ‘linked sweetness long drawn out’—but it would be impossible to say that the courting had been devoid of poetry.
Jabez had inundated the lady with poetry. Susan had a nice little collection of Jabez’s poems upstairs. ‘I wish he wouldn’t write such rigmaroles,’ she said one day, as she tried to understand a ‘Sonnet to my Susan,’ which Jabez sent on a sheet of Grigg and Limpet’s headed note, and which he assured her he had composed with his window open, gazing at the stars, and thinking of her. Mrs. Turvey, reading the following, might well require time to consider what it meant: