“No Tombey, I don’t. Business is business; and if I happen to have got to windward of the young woman, why, so much the better for me. She’s getting her experience, that’s all; and she ain’t the first, and won’t be the last. But if she goes saying much more about me, I go for her for slander, that’s sure.”
“On the legal ground that the greater the truth, the greater the libel, I presume?”
“Confound her!” went on Meeson, without noticing his remark, and contracting his heavy eyebrows, “there’s no end to the trouble she has brought on me. I quarrelled with my nephew about her, and now she’s dragging my name through the dirt here, and I’ll bet the story will go all over New Zealand and Australia.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Tombey, “I fancy you will find it take a lot of choking; and now, Mr. Meeson, with your permission I will say a word, and try and throw a new light upon a very perplexing matter. It never seems to have occurred to you what an out-and-out blackguard you are, so I may as well put it to you plainly. If you are not a thief, you are, at least, a very well-coloured imitation. You take a girl’s book and make hundreds upon hundreds out of it, and give her fifty. You tie her down, so as to provide for successful swindling of the same sort, during future years, and then, when she comes to beg a few pounds of you, you show her the door. And now you wonder, Mr. Meeson, that respectable people will have nothing to do with you! Well, now, I tell you, my opinion is that the only society to which you would be really suited is that of cow-hide. Good morning,” and the large young man walked off, his very moustachios curling with wrath and contempt. Thus, for a second time, did the great Mr. Meeson hear the truth from the lips of babes and sucklings, and the worst of it was that he could not disinherit Number Two as he had Number One.
Now this will strike the reader as being very warm advocacy on the part of Mr. Tombey, who, being called in to console and bless, cursed with such extraordinary vigour. It may even strike the discerning reader—and all readers, or, at least, nearly all readers, are of course discerning: far too much so, indeed—that there must have been a reason for it; and the discerning reader will be right. Augusta’s grey eyes had been too much for Mr. Tombey, as they had been too much for Eustace Meeson before him. His passion had sprung up and ripened in that peculiarly rapid and vigorous fashion that passions do on board ship. A passenger steamer is Cupid’s own hot-bed, and in this way differs from a sailing-ship. On the sailing-ship, indeed, the preliminary stages are the same. The seed roots as strongly, and grows and flowers with equal vigour; but here comes the melancholy part—it withers and decays with equal rapidity. The voyage is too long. Too much is mutually revealed. The matrimonial iron cannot be struck while it is hot, and long before the weary ninety days are over it is once more cold and black, or at the best glows with but a feeble heat. But on the steamship there is no time for this, as any traveller knows. Myself—I, the historian—have, with my own eyes seen a couple meet for the first time at Maderia, get married at the Cape, and go on as man and wife in the same vessel to Natal. And, therefore, it came to pass that very evening a touching, and, on the whole melancholy, little scene was enacted near the smoke-stack of the Kangaroo.
Mr. Tombey and Miss Augusta Smithers were leaning together over the bulwarks and watching the phosphorescent foam go flashing past. Mr. Tombey was nervous and ill at ease; Miss Smithers very much at ease, and reflecting that her companion’s moustachios would very well become a villain in a novel.
Mr. Tombey looked at the star-spangled sky, on which the Southern Cross hung low, and he looked at the phosphorescent sea; but from neither did inspiration come. Inspiration is from within, and not from without. At last, however, he made a gallant and a desperate effort.
“Miss Smithers,” he said in a voice trembling with agitation.
“Yes, Mr. Tombey,” answered Augusta, quietly; “what is it?”
“Miss Smithers,” he went on—“Miss Augusta, I don’t know what you will think of me, but I must tell you, I can’t keep it any longer, I love you!”