“How are you and Dad getting on with the book?” she asked. “Is there much more work to do?”
He drew his pipe from his mouth, and knocked its ashes out against the stump of a tree.
“A great deal,” he replied. “A very great deal more! Our researches lead us deeper and deeper—into the most astonishing intricacies of language—indeed one can positively say that language makes history. Language creates dynasties and destroys them,—Language crowns kings and equally decapitates them—Language—”
The sonorous clanging of a bell sounded persistently at this moment.
“Dinner,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “That is a language every one understands! I think dinner, or the lack of it, has made more dynasties than anything! Are you coming?”
“I follow you,” he said, moved by a sort of obstinacy which led him to avoid the courtesy of accompanying her. She thereupon sprang away from him into the house, where she took her seat at the dinner table opposite her father, a choleric old gentleman who had already begun guzzling the soup. He ‘never waited for anybody’ as he informed all whom it might concern; and when the Philosopher sauntered in, a few minutes late as he always did for every meal, to the mute disgust of the parlourmaid, there was very little soup left. At this the fair Sentimentalist was not ill-pleased. It was naughty, she said to herself, to be quite glad that there was so little soup for so learned a man—still, learned as he was, he made ugly noises when he ate soup, and it was just as well that there was not much to make a noise with. She found the dinner rather boresome on this particular evening,—the Philosopher and her father prosed and prosed along in the dreariest dry ruts of conversation, now and then telling each other what they considered “good” stories, old as the oldest inhabitant of the most ancient jest-book. The Philosopher, in his assertive superiority of intelligence, had an aggravating way of prefacing any special story of his own by the question “Are you listening?” and, if the response was not entirely submissive and satisfactory, he would sniff a whole nest of embryo influenzas up his nose and remark, cuttingly, “Then I’ll wait!” The wrathful wretchedness of the persons who thus held him sniffing and “waiting” can only be imagined by discerning students of human nature. And the Sentimentalist, a little less patient with his ways than usual, felt a great relief when she could escape from the dinner table to the solitude of her own quiet room. Once there, she leaned out from the open window and looked at the bright stars, sprinkling the sky like big dewdrops,—and wondered, a trifle sadly, how life was going to turn out for her. From early childhood she had devoted every wish, every thought, every hope to her father,—and he was getting very old, very gouty and very cross. Lately he had found a certain solace for his constant irritability in the study of philology and the society of the Philosopher who assumed the same bent of research,—and, to a certain extent, she was grateful for this distraction to his frequently self-torturing mind. But she was rather a lonely little person,—and when the Philosopher first appeared on her limited horizon, she had hailed his presence with an unreasoning joy, because she loved books, and understood that he loved them too. She pictured the delightful talks she would have with this gifted personage about the authors they both admired,—and she was certain he would have a splendid character—generous, noble, patient, kind—because—oh, well!—because he had studied so much, and knew so much, and because he was a Philosopher. So she had idealised him in her mind, and accepted him at the ideal valuation,—a condition of pure romantic sentimentalism which amused him because it is rare to find nowadays, and when found, is so easy to destroy. From the merely physical and absolutely sensual side of things he was disposed to make love to her. The tentative efforts he had put forth in that direction had moved her, first to wonder, then to the faintest, half-compassionate response. He was old, she thought—and he seemed to have no one who cared for him. And she was touched to find so learned a man expressing any liking for her even by a look,—though her own intellectual ability was higher than his, had she known it. She was sorry for him too, in a way—he appeared to be a neglected sort of creature, albeit an authority on dull subjects in dull weekly journals and monthly magazines,—his coats were shabby, his shirt-cuffs frayed at the edges,—and he never at any time was what is called “well-groomed.” She did not realise that his generally unkempt condition was part of his particular “philosophic” manner,—a kind of advertised contempt for conventional cleanliness. He could be very agreeable when he chose,—almost lovable;—he could be amusing, entertaining and witty by turns; and when strangers first met him, they generally received a most favourable impression. The second meeting, however, unfortunately swamped the effect of the first,—and when he stayed on and on in a house, as he was doing now, there were times when his room was more desired than his company. But a kind of glamour,—a reflex glitter of genius in him,—had somewhat blinded the Sentimentalist to any clear perception of his true character as a man, apart altogether from his literary distinction,—and though she had begun to be uneasy and dubious as to his sincerity and good feeling, she would not give way to these thoughts, no matter how urgently they pressed upon her. And while she mused, and looked up at the stars, they seemed to look responsively down upon her in a winking, twinkling way of bright suggestiveness.
“What a quaint little soul it is!” so they might have expressed themselves in a couple of light-flashes. “Here it lives, tricking itself into thinking an egotist a great man! We know better!”
And they sparkled their emphatic meaning through the dark veil of air, while she, leaving her window-post of observation, took her embroidery and went down to the billiard-room there to sit in silent patience while her father and the Philosopher played a long game, as they did every night with an unwearying pertinacity till bed-time. They did not consider whether she was amused or bored by what to themselves was their own consummate skill in handling the cue, and she would gladly have stayed away but that her father expected her to act as “marker” if desired, and otherwise make herself useful. The whole business was frightfully dull as far as she was concerned—she was tired to death of the continuous click of the billiard balls, and sometimes heard them in her dreams, so incessantly were they rolled about night after night. The oddest thing to her mind was that the Philosopher never seemed tired of the game. He never spoke to her while engaged in it—or, for that matter, to her father except in monosyllables,—round and round the table he strutted, cue in hand, pipe in mouth, without a thought for anything or anybody but himself. He played more skilfully than his host, and never lost an opportunity of asserting the fact,—and sometimes when the gentle Sentimentalist saw her father getting redder and more congested in the face with suppressed annoyance at his various “misses” she was both sorry and anxious lest his restrained feeling should culminate in an attack of illness. However, it was no use for her to confide these fears to the Philosopher; he had the greatest contempt for illness that affected anybody but himself. But—after all!—she decided it was something of an advantage to know a man who could always get an article into the big “Reviews” provided it were only dull enough,—it was surely a privilege to associate with such a powerful personage!—and it was an understood thing that gifted men—Philosophers—were apt to become self-centred. Now Jack,—oh, Jack was not self-centred—but then he was not clever—he was—well!—he was just “Jack”!
CHAPTER V
ON a warm August morning it is not altogether unpleasant to recline on a long lounge chair in the deep soft shadow of full-foliaged trees and resign one’s self to meditation which may or may not be profitable. The Philosopher was in this condition of dolce far niente, and though he did not present an altogether elegant appearance in the recumbent attitude he was for the moment more concerned with inward comfort than exterior effect. He was in a thinking mood. He was taking himself seriously to task and considering whether he should marry. He was not really a marrying man, but it occurred to him now and then that he was no longer young, and that it might be necessary to have some one to take care of him. No one was so well adapted to “take care” of an ageing, gouty, grumpy man with a touch of intellectuality about him as a wife. A wife with a sufficiency of good looks to be agreeable to the eye,—a wife with a sufficiency of money in her own right to save her husband all extra exertion in the business of living. Now the Philosopher had just by chance found out that his little friend and hostess, the Sentimentalist, had or would have money. He thought, with pleasing placidity, of a college friend of his own, who had married a woman with money, and who had gleefully rejoiced in his position, with refreshing candour, saying,—“A Plum I tell you! A regular Plum! Ripe and ready!—fell into my mouth with a bang!”