“Between ourselves, then,” replied Macaulay, “it was my slippers. That and an indifferent dish of tea. If my wife had not got me into my slippers, neither you nor I would be sitting so jocular here. The freedom of the mountains is not to be compared with a pair of dry hose and content beside the fire.”
At that the Captain grimaced. “Tut!” said he. “I wish I had not asked you. I expected a miracle, and you give me only an epitome of civilisation.”
THE BROOCH.
Wanlock of Manor looked with a puckered face at the tiny jewel flaming in the hollow of his hand, and, for the hour forswearing piety, cursed the lamented Lady Grace, his sister, haut en bas, with all the fury of his bitter disappointment. The harridan had her revenge! Last night he dreamt her envoys by their wailings made the forest hideous; already amongst the Shadows of the monstrous other world she must be chuckling (if the Shades have laughter) through her toothless gums at the chagrin of her brother, for the first of the seven shocks of evil fortune had that moment staggered him, and he was smitten to the vitals in his purse and pride.
The brooch, so wretchedly inadequate as consolation for the legacy he had long anticipated, had seemed last night as he peered at it with dubious eyes a bauble wholly innocent, and he had laughed at its sinister reputation, which in a last vagary of her spiteful humour she had been at pains to apprise him of in a posthumous private letter. “Seven shocks of dire disaster, and the last the worst,” he had read in the crabbed writing of the woman who, even in prosperity, could never pardon him his luckless speculation with the money that was meant to be her dowry; he had sneered at her pagan folly, but now the premonstration bore a different aspect; he was stunned with the news that his law-plea with Paul Mellish of The Peel was lost, and that the bare expenses of that long-protracted fight should cost him all that was left of his beggared fortunes. But that was not the worst of it, for Mellish, as in pity of a helpless foe, had waived his admitted claim to the swampy field which was the object of their litigation. The first blow, surely, with a vengeance!
For a moment Wanlock, now assured of some uncanny essence in the jewel, thought to defend himself by its immediate destruction, and then he had a craftier inspiration. He strode across the room, threw up the window-sash, and bellowed upon Stephen, his idle son, the spoiled monopolist of what love he had to spare.
“You see this brooch?” he said when the lad, with a grey dog at his heels, came in with a rakish swagger from his interrupted dalliance with the last maid (so to call her) left of Wanlock’s retinue.
They looked at it together as it lay in the father’s hand—a garnet, cut en cabochon, smoothly rounded like a blob of claret by the lapidary, clasped by thin gold claws; and the dog, with eyes askance, stood near them, wrapt in cogitations of a different world. Their heads went down upon the gem: they stared in silence, strangely influenced by its eye-like shape and sullen glow, that seemed to come less from the polished surface than from a cynic spirit inward, animate. It had the look of age: had glowed on the breasts of high-scarfed dandies, pinned the screens on girlish bosoms flat now in the dust, known the dear privacies of love and passion, lurked in the dusk of treasuries, kept itself unspotted, indifferent, unchanged through the flux of human generations. Lord! that men’s lives should be so short and the objects of their fashioning so permanent!
“It may be braw, but it’s no’ very bonny,” at the last quo’ Stephen Wanlock.