Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City: His Progress and Adventures

by S. R. Crockett

What Mr. Iverach said under his breath of his excellent friend Mr. Robert Greg Tennant at that moment, it is perhaps better not to write down. He rose and went to the window. From the wide space of its oriel, he watched with furtive sidelong gloom the confabulation of Celie and Cleg. Celie was explaining something with great animation to the boy, who looked down and seemed a little doubtful. Then with inimitable archness, which seemed thrown away upon an Arab of the city (if it were intended for him), Celie explained the whole matter over again from the top of the steps. She went a little way back towards the house.

"Now you quite understand?" she cried with impressive emphasis. And lest he should not yet comprehend, she turned ere she reached the door, ran to Cleg at the gate with still more inimitable daintiness, and, with her hand upon his arm, she explained the whole thing all over again. The Junior Partner felt a little string tighten somewhere about the region in which (erroneously) he believed his heart to lie. He clenched his fist at the sight.

"O confound it!" he remarked, for no very obvious reason, as he turned away.

But Celie was full of the most complete unconsciousness. Yet (of course without knowing it) she quite spoilt the game of two young men, who were playing lawn tennis on the court of a neighbouring house. Their returns grew wilder and their services were beneath contempt. Their several partners (attractive young women whom the new style of dress did not suit) met casually at the net, and one of them remarked to the other, "Isn't she a minx? And her pretending to be good and all that!" Which was perhaps their way of clenching fists and saying, "Confound it!" Or worse.

Then in a little while Cleg went down the Avenue with a sense that the heavens had fallen, and that angels were getting quite common about the garden gates of the South Side. He carried the arm on which Celie had laid her hand a little apart from him. It was as blissfully sensitive as if he had been ten years older.

Celie stood a moment at the gate looking after him. She shaded her eyes from the sunset and looked down the long street. It is a charming pose when one is sure of one's arms and shoulders. At this moment one of the young men in the garden sent a ball over the house, and the eyes of his partner met those of the other girl. Peace was upon the earth at that sweet hour of sunset, but good-will to women was not in their two hearts. Celie felt that the light summer silk had already paid for itself.

"I don't believe a bit in religion—so there!" said the girl next door to her friend over the net.

At that moment Celie gave a little sigh to think that her first night in the new garment was so nearly over. "And father wanted to give me a black silk," said Celie Tennant to herself. Celie felt that she had not wasted her time nor her father's money.

So to show her gratitude she went and found her father. He was slowly walking up and down the little plot of garden, meditatively smoking his large evening pipe. He stopped now before a favourite row of cabbages, and now at the end of the strawberry bed. He regarded them equally with the same philosophical and meditative attention. He was a practical man and insisted on growing vegetables in his own private domains at the back, leaving his daughter to cultivate roses and the graces in the front garden.