“Then what he has done is simply this,” cried Alice, looking nobly; “he has saved her life, and her brother’s: he has taught her now to fear herself; and her heart is his, if he cares for it.”
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
THE LAST WORD COMES FROM BONNY.
It takes but little time to tell what happened to the rest of them. Sir Roland Lorraine had the pleasure of seeing two tribes of grandchildren round him, who routed him out of his book-room, and scattered his unwholesome tendencies wholesale. If he shocked society in his middle age, society had revenge in the end, and pursued him, like the Eumenides. The difference was this, however, that here were truly well-meaning ones, not called so by timorous truckling. And another point of distinction might be found in the style of their legs and bodies. Also, they had no “stony glare,” but the brightest of all young eyes, that shine like a flower filled with morning dew.
These little men and women played at hide-and-seek, and made rich echo in the Woeburn channel. Forsooth, that fearful stream (like other fateful rivers), beaten by Vulcanian fires of Bottler—or, as some people said (who knew not Bottler), by the power of the long dry frost—retired into the bowels of the earth, and never means to come forth again. But before leaving off it did one good thing—it drowned old Nanny Stilgoe. “Prophet of ill, never yet to me spakest thou thing lucksome”—this was the sentiment of that river when disappointed of Alice. Old Nanny ran out of her door next day, with a stick, at a boy who cast snowballs, and she slipped on some ice, and in she went; and some people tried to rake her out, but she was too perverse for them. Her prophecies of evil fell, like lead on her head, and sank her; and the parish was fiercely divided whether she ought to have Christian burial. But Rector Hales let them talk as they liked, and refused to hear reason about it. He had made up his own mind what to do (which of all things is the foremost); so he buried old Nanny and paid for it all and set up her tombstone, whereon the sculptor, with visions of his own date prolonged, set down her figure at 110.
The passing of time is one of those things that most astonish every one. For instance, no one would ever believe, except with a hand upon either temple, that Applewood farm is now carried on, and all the growing business done, by a sturdy and highly enlightened young fellow, whose name is Struan Lovejoy. He owes his origin to a heavy cold, caught by his father (the present highly respected Admiral Sir Charles Lovejoy), through the freezing of his naval trousers, and the coddling which of course ensued. Charlie’s heart lay open through all the stages of catarrh, and he felt, even in the worst fits of sneezing, whose initials were done in hair on three handkerchiefs under his pillow. In short, no sooner did his nose begin to resume its duty in the system, and his eyes to cease from running, then he took Cecil Hales by the hand, and said that he had something to say to her. And he said it well; as sailors do. And she could not deny that it might mean something, if ever they could maintain themselves.
This is what all young people say; some with a little, and some with less, discretion upon the subject. The helm of all the question hangs upon the man’s own sternpost. There is no time to talk of that. Charlie married Cecil; and they had a son called “Struan.”
Struan Lovejoy took the turn for gardening and for growing, which had failed the Lovejoy race in the middle generation. Gout descends, and so does growing, with a skip of one step of mankind; and you cannot make the wrong generation lay heel on spade or toe in slipper.
But most of us can make some men feel—however small our circle is—that there is room for them inside it. That we scorn hypocritical love of mean humanity; but love the noble specimens—when we get them. That we know how short our time is, and attempt to do a little forward for the slowly rolling age. In a word, that, taking things altogether, they are pretty nearly as good as could have been hoped for, even sixty years ago.
But it is quite a few years back, to wit in 1861, when the great leading case upon rights of way—“Lovejoy v. Shatterlocks”—was tried for the ninth and final time. Chief Justice Sir Gregory Lovejoy, through feelings of delicacy, left the Bench, and would not even allow his wife—our Phyllis Catherow—to be called. But Major-general Sir Hilary Lorraine marched into the witness-box; and so vividly did he call to mind what had passed (and what had been stopped at the white gate, and where the key was kept) half a century ago, that the defendant had no leg to stand upon. Mabel (who heard all his evidence, with an Alice Mabel’s hand in hers) vowed that he made a confusion of keys, and was thinking of the gate where she came to meet him. And when he had time for more reflection, he could not contradict her.