“I saw it so stated in the papers, and they are generally well informed. What sort of a person was she? I ask you, as the Rector’s wife, was she worldly? Was she at all prepared for the great change?”
Mrs. Cribbage shook her head.
“I was afraid it was so,” said Welsh solemnly. “Then I should not be at all surprised if she also had gone to the same warm place as my poor nephew.”
“It is not for us to judge,” said Mrs. Cribbage gravely; “still, if it be permitted us to look beyond the veil, I would not say but that she had. She was barely civil to me, once she was positively rude. Yes—I have no doubt that she also has gone—gone—”
“To the same warm place,” added Welsh.
CHAPTER LIII.
ALLAH’S SLIPPER.
Having occupied an entire chapter with dippers, it may seem to the reader to be acting in excess of what is just to revert in the ensuing chapter to the same topic; but if we mention dippers again, it is in another sense altogether.
In an oriental tale, a sultan was unable to conceive how that a thousand days could seem to pass as a minute, or a minute be expanded into a thousand days. Then a magician bade a pail of water be brought into the royal presence, and invited the sultan to plunge his head into it. He did so, and at once found himself translated to a strange country where he was destitute of means of life, and was forced to support existence by hard labour as a porter. He married a wife, and became the father of seven children, after which his wife died, and as he was oppressed with old age and poverty, he plunged into a river to finish his woes, when—up came his head out of the pail of water. He stormed at the magician for having given him such a life of wretchedness. “But, sire,” said the magician, “your august head has been under water precisely three seconds.”
Now I do not mean to say that this story is applicable to my hero and heroine in all its parts. I do not mean that their history and that of the sultan fit, when one is applied to the other, as to the triangles A B C and D E F in the fourth proposition of the First Book of Euclid, but only that there is a resemblance. Both Giles Saltren and Arminell had, as the expression goes, got their heads under water, and having got them there, found themselves beginning a new career, in a fresh place of existence, with fresh experiences to make and connections to form. The past was to both cut away as if it had never been, and, unlike this sultan, there was no prospect of their getting their heads up again into their former life. They must, therefore, make the best they could of that new life in which they found themselves; and, perhaps, Arminell acted sensibly in resolving that they should begin it together.
If Arminell had settled into her house at Bournemouth, and kept her pony-carriage, and appeared to be unstraitened in circumstances, the residents of Bournemouth would, in all probability, have asked who this Miss Inglett was, and have turned up the name in the Red Books, and pushed enquiries which could with difficulty have been evaded; but when she set up her establishment as Mrs. Saltren the case was altered; for the patronymic does not occur in the “Peerage” or in “Burke’s Landed Gentry.” It was a name to baffle enquiry, whereas Inglett was calculated to provoke it. It is true that Arminell might have changed her maiden name without altering her condition, but this she was reluctant to do.