"Hearse-plumes would not be essential, sir," said the literal Capper. "But I think the child should have a little black suit."
"The child will run about in his usual rags," replied Old Peppery, in a voice of thunder; "and if I catch you or any one else stuffing him up with yarns about canker-worms or hell-fire, or any trimmings of that description, I tell you straight that there will be the father and mother of a row."
"Yes, sir," said Capper meekly. "And I desire, sir," she added in the same even tone, "to give warning."
Thereupon Uncle Jimmy had stamped his way downstairs to the hall, and Hughie was left wondering what the warning could have been which Mrs. Capper desired to utter. It must have been a weighty one, for she continued to deliver it at intervals during the next ten years, long indeed after Hughie's growing intelligence had discovered its meaning. But her utterances received about as much attention from her employer as Cassandra's from hers.
However, the immediate result of the conversation recorded above was that Mrs. Capper made no attempt to deck Hughie in crape or hearse-plumes; and later on, when he was old enough to understand the meaning of death, his uncle told him how his parents had gone to their God together—"the happiest fate, old man, that can fall on husband and wife"—one stormy night in the Bay of Biscay, in company with every other soul on board the troop-ship Helianthus, and that henceforth Hughie must be prepared to regard the broken-down old buffer before him as his father and mother.
Hughie had gravely accepted this arrangement, and for more than seventeen years he and his uncle had treated one another as father and son.
Jimmy Marrable was a little eccentric,—but so are most old bachelors,—and like a good many eccentric men he rather prided himself on his peculiarities. If anything, he rather cultivated them. One of his most startling characteristics was a habit of thinking aloud. He would emerge unexpectedly from a brown study, to comment to himself with stunning suddenness and absolute candour on the appearance and manners of those around him. It was credibly reported that he had once taken a rather intense and voluble lady in to dinner, and after regarding her for some time with a fixity of attention which had deluded the good soul into the belief that he was hanging on her lips, had remarked to himself, with appalling distinctness, during a lull in the conversation: "Guinea set—misfit at the top—gutta-percha fixings—wonder they don't drop into her soup!" and continued his meal without any apparent consciousness of having said anything unusual.
He was eccentric, too, about other matters. Once Hughie, returning from school for his holidays, discovered that there had been an addition to the family in his absence.
Mrs. Capper's very face in the hall told him that something was wrong. Its owner informed Hughie that though one should be prepared to take life as one found it, and live and let live had been her motto from infancy, her equilibrium ever since the thing had happened had lain at the mercy of the first aggressively disposed feather that came along, and what people in the neighbourhood would say she dared not think.
She ran on. Hughie waited patiently, and presently unearthed the facts.