Orville College: A Story

by Mrs. Henry Wood

"What a lingo, to be sure!" cried Sir Simon, as he trotted up the hot and blazing port. "Why, actually those little street urchins are jabbering French! Halloa! stop!" he added, coming to a sudden halt opposite the goods' custom-house: "Where's Dick!"

Nobody remembered to have seen Dick since the landing. "He'll turn up, sir," returned Loftus, slightly annoyed at the unequal progress they were making. "Dick won't get lost."

Sir Simon did not feel so sure upon the point; he thought he might get lost himself in that helpless foreign town; becoming, as he was, more strange and bewildered every moment. But Dick came running up from behind, dragging with him a tall, square-built man with a thoughtful face and grey hair. Sir Simon nearly shook his hands off, for it was Mr. Gall.

"What a mercy!" said he. "I never was so glad in all my life; did not know anything of your coming. We have been a week at Chatham, staying near my poor brother Joe, the hop-dealer, who made that sad failure of it. You know him, Gall. I wanted to see how he and the wife and chicks were of, poor things, and we put up at an inn there."

Dick shook hands with Paradyne. Dick listened to the news that Onions was in the town, and that Talbot was arriving, with a sort of rapture: the Browns too, major and minor. Dick would have stood on his head had there been room on the port to do it.

A few days more, and the different friends and schoolmates had collected there. It was indeed as if they had premeditated the gathering. Some went grandly viâ Folkestone, some more economically by the boat from London: that little muff, Stiggings, who was fond of writing to Miss Rose, made the trip in a sailing vessel, invited to it by the captain; he was awfully sick all the way, and landed more dead than alive. The Galls and Sir Simon's party were at the Hotel du Nord; the Talbots had small lodgings in the Rue Neuve Chaussée; the Browns took a furnished house in the open country, beyond the Rue Royale; and Lady Sophia Leek, who had no acquaintance with the rest, and made none with them, was staying at the Hotel des Bains. And the time went on.

But that Sir Simon Orville was the most unsuspicious of men, he had undoubtedly not failed to detect that some ill-feeling was rife between his friend Gall's eldest son, and Bertie Loftus. For three whole days after William Gall's arrival, they did not exchange a word with each other; on the fourth, a quarrel, not loud, but bitter, took place on the sands; and those low, concentrated, bitter quarrels are worse than loud ones. People, scattered in groups at only a few yards' distance, did not hear it; but they might have seen the white faces raised on each other with an angry glare, had they been less occupied with themselves, with their gossip, with the picking up of shells. Bertie Loftus was cherishing the remembrance of his insult, and paying it off fourfold in superciliousness now.

Sir Simon's mind was too agreeably filled to afford leisure for detecting feelings not on the surface: everything was new to him, everything delightful. The free and easy life in the French town; the unceremonious habits; the sociable salon, where they sat with the windows open to the street; the passing intimacy made with the rest of the guests; the sufficiently-well-appointed meals in the dining-room—the lingering breakfast at will, the chance lunch, the elaborate dinner—were what he had never before met with. Mr. Bertie Loftus considered it a state of things altogether common; but it was after the social, simple-minded man's own heart. There was the pier to walk on; with its commodious seats at the end, whence he could watch the vessels in at will, and revel in the view of the dancing waves; there was the laid-out ground before that gay building whose French name Sir Simon could not pronounce, the établissement, where he could sit in the sun or the shade, watching the croquet players, and reading his newspaper between whiles; there was the terrace beyond, with its benches; there were the sands stretching out in the distance. An upper terrace also, close at hand, where he could place himself at a small round table and call for lemonade in the summer's heat. Sir Simon would be now in one spot, now in another, his Times and telescope in his hand, his friend Gall not far off. And Mr. Gall was a sensible, shrewd man, looked up to in the city as the head of a wealthy wholesale business; he was not despised by his own people, however he might be by Bertie Loftus. What with the attractions out of doors and the attractions in, Sir Simon thought Boulogne was pleasant as a fabled town of enchantment.

"A scandal-loving, vulgar, crowded, disreputable, unsavoury place, sir!" was the judgment some new acquaintance passed upon it one day, to the intense approval of Bertie. But Sir Simon shook his head, and could not see it.

Sir Simon stood at the end of the pier one afternoon, his telescope to his eye, ranging the horizon for the first appearance of the London boat. He was looking in the wrong direction for it, but that was all one to happy Sir Simon. Young Paradyne put him right. By that boat he was expecting Mr. and Mrs. Loftus. Some business having taken them unexpectedly to London, Sir Simon had written to say, "Come over here and be my guests." It suddenly struck him that the sight of the boy by his side, Paradyne, might call up unpleasant recollections to Mr. Loftus. Sir Simon had got to like the boy excessively; but that was no reason why Mr. Loftus should tolerate the intimacy.