The Pennycomequicks, Volume 3 (of 3)

by S. Baring-Gould

The author had once to do with a worthy, pious man, put in a situation under him, who was triple-panoplied in the hide of self-esteem. As is usual with such persons, he was not much short of a fool, and did very foolish, inconsiderate things. When called to task for some egregious act, he bore the reprimand with meekness, then retired to his closet, where he prayed for him who had rebuked him, as for a persecutor. Never for one particle of a moment did it occur to him that he himself deserved blame. And the author knows full well that the callous-skinned who read these pages will feel no cut from his words, but draw up their heels under them, out of the way of his scythe.

It has been proved by experiment that the tortoise can live though deprived of its brains, but the tortoise is the animal with the hardest epidermis known. Perhaps the converse may be true, that those animals with the largest proportion of brain may have the most sensitive skins.

Now Philip was no fool. He had plenty of sound sense, but his moral faculties had been warped by the circumstances of his early career, and he had grown up with great suspicion of others, but sure confidence in himself. Now, suddenly, his eyes had been opened by a rude shock; his moral nature had been subjected to a glissade and a jolt almost as severe as that which his body had undergone, and as he was not tough and horny-hided in mind, he felt the results as acutely. If he ached with bruises and sprains in flesh and sinew, so did he ache with bruise and sprain in all the tissues and fibres of his inner spiritual self.

When Salome returned to Philip's room she found him disinclined to talk; he was still twitching and quivering from the lashes he had received, conscious only of his present pain, covered with humiliation. He had not been given time to think of his future conduct, even to consider the retrospect; the present torture occupied and made to tingle every nerve of his soul.

With the innate tact which Salome possessed, she saw at once that he did not wish to be disturbed; though she could not divine that he had other cause for suffering than his fall, or that other injuries had been done him than those which made his body black and blue. She knew that he was in pain, and that he sought to disguise the fact from her, and though full of solicitude for him, she did not harass him with attentions.

She drew a little stool beside his bed, and seated herself on it, with needlework for the baby, and did not look at him.

He lay on his back, but turned his head, and saw her beautiful auburn hair, with the evening sun tinging it with orange fire. For some time he looked at it without thought of her, only of himself, his shame, his jarred self-respect. That jest of Artemisia about the Esquimaux watching about a hole in the ice, to pull out of it a fish, was present to him; he saw the fish come up flapping its tail and tossing to escape the barb; and then thought of himself being hauled out of the hole in the snow through which he had plunged. Then he considered how that she—this malicious woman—had held him with a hook in his jaws and had played with him, and then how he had been suddenly plunged out of a world of light and smoothness into an abyss where all was darkness and horror. Where was he? Into what had he fallen? Had he not almost shot over the precipice, and gone down into the uttermost depths of degradation? What if this accident had not befallen him? What if that woman had gone on playing with him, and had lured him further, as in the folk-tales the nixies of the waterfalls lure shepherds to throw themselves over, with the vain belief that by so doing they will fall into the arms and be received into the realm of the water sprites?

His ideas became confused. At one moment he was a fish caught by a barb, then he was clinging to a rock, withdrawing from the enticements of a siren. The sun had set, or no longer crowned Salome with fire, she continued her needlework till dusk closed in rapidly and prevented her seeing her stitches. But she sat on, upon her little stool, resting her cheek against the bedclothes. Philip, half dreaming, had caught a lock of her hair and twisted it round his finger, and held it as if it were something that was so firm, so sure that if he clung to it, if he would retain it about his finger as a golden hoop, he could not continue his slide and fall, and so thinking, or fancying, in a confused condition of mind, bred of, or fostered by pain and shame, he had fallen asleep. Salome sat on, did not venture to move her head lest she should disturb his sleep by withdrawing her hair from his fingers.

Next morning Mrs. Sidebottom, Miss Durham, Mrs. Baynes, and the Labarte girls, together with the captain, departed for Andermatt, leaving Salome with her husband in the hospice. They did not leave without an altercation and a controversy between Mrs. Sidebottom and the hostess relative to the bill, in which both engaged with unmatched weapons, as Mrs. Sidebottom could speak no Italian, and Signora Lombardi no English. The former could not be brought to admit that the hostess was justified in charging somewhat higher for provisions, six thousand eight hundred feet above the sea, than in the valleys where wine is produced and calves are reared. Mrs. Sidebottom effected no greater reduction than a franc and a half, which she insisted on having expunged, as a charge for a meal she protested she had not eaten. She then attempted to shift a couple of bottles of sparkling Asti from her account to that of Miss Durham, and to transfer sundry eggs for breakfast to the bill of Mrs. Baynes, who she was sure had ordered them, though she admitted having eaten them on the urgency of Janet. Eggs six thousand eight hundred feet above the sea are—well, eggs. Fowls at that elevation are sluggish layers, and eggs if brought up from the valleys run risks of being broken on the road. Mrs. Sidebottom, who resisted paying a penny a-piece for them when charged to her, saw that there was reason for setting that value on them when they were in Mrs. Baynes's account. She fought desperately over the fish. There were lakes hard-by the hospice doors, and fish in lakes, easily procurable, therefore it was unreasonable that they should be charged fancy prices.

Mrs. Sidebottom achieved a great success in negotiating a bargain with a driver from Andermatt, whereby she and the captain were taken back by a returned carriage that had discharged its load at the hospice; she succeeded in securing the conveyance for half the ordinary price. Though she engaged the carriage for herself and her son, the captain did not return in it, but the three demoiselles Labarte. Janet and the captain, who had become inseparable, and who reacted on each other, he reviving her health, and she evoking life and wit out of his torpid nature, returned in a smaller trap behind the carriage of Mrs. Sidebottom. Miss Durham had made her own arrangements, and went off in a cabriolet by herself. She took an almost affectionate farewell of Salome, whom she really liked, though she despised her. Miss Durham was sure she had done Salome a good turn in the way in which she had brought Philip to his senses, and she accordingly patronized and petted his simple wife. She was pleased with herself for having contributed to the happiness of the young wife by making a fool of her husband, and then telling him what a fool he had been made.