All this was unhappy, unhealthy business. Why return for such life as this? He began to talk with Granby of their journeys and their hunts proposed; but Granby, who, perforce, had become a Stoic, hopeless of any return to his happy happiness, satisfied himself very well where he was. There were snipe and plover to be bagged; the bay still yielded as good fish as had ever been taken. All the ladies who rode were ready to be companioned by so distinguished a cavalier. All who drove thought him an agreeable and decorative object on the front seats of the drivers’ drags. He knew all the catsmen of the docks. At every yachting party he, as well as Waddy, was an indispensable. He bathed; he danced; he astonished people at late, sleepy breakfasts by coming in with vast appetite from seven-league walks and presenting this pallid danseuse of the last night’s hop with a wild rosebud from a hill a dozen miles away, or that weary, nightless, ballful dowager with a creamy, new-laid egg. He held his own at the club, at billiards with the three ponies of the summer: with Mr. Skibbereen, the cool, cautious man and dashing player: with Blinders, the dashing man and accurate, mathematical player: with Bob O’Link, the sentimental man and nonchalant player. Poor Bob O’Link used to hum lugubrious airs, such as the serenade from “Trovatore,” and sigh to Granby, particularly when he made a scratch, that a man whose destiny it was to be a poet could only attain to billiard-marker results.
“I’m too lucky,” said Bob O’, “to lose money. Then I might grow poor and work. But I’m like Cæsar—wasn’t it Cæsar aut nullus?—everything I touch turns to gold.” And then he would make a lunging stroke that the tyros talked of all summer.
“Poor fellow!” said Granby. “You have reason to be a disappointed man. I’ve known whole families in the same condition. You’ll have to marry a strong-minded woman and learn to run a sewing machine.”
“I don’t see any strong-minded women,” replied Link, looking into an empty chalk-cup for chalk.
“There’s Miss Anthrope,” suggested Granby. “Besides, Peter Skerrett says it’s one of the oldest and most respectable families. They came in, did the Anthropes, with the creation. Marry her.”
“Now you mention it, I believe I will,” cried Bob; and he did. And Miss Anthrope, now Mrs. O’Link, is one of the lights of the woman’s question, while Bob O’ is really happy at home in a cradle Elysium, and would not give an obolus to be ferried back to the mundane joys of his former life.
Major Granby was thus, in truth, useful as well as agreeable, and with the feelings of a man who is doing his duty towards himself and incidentally towards others, including his protégé, Ambient, he determined to keep Mr. Waddy at Newport.
I should be doing great injustice to Granby did I fail to say that, with all his pretence of personal enjoyment, it was mainly on Ira’s account that he stayed. Granby had not found his friend any less malcontent out of the world than in it. He had seen the same dreariness and utter dissatisfaction overcome him in camps, in desert or forest; under the special and immediate influence of Nature, kindly restorer, he had seen him unrestored. Not that his friend was morbid, inactive, sulky, dull, selfish—never these. Such traits terminate companionship, if not friendly regard. Ira was always, when the time came for exertion, alert, bold, a trapper of the most up-to-trap kind. But when the moment’s fleeting purpose was o’ertook, he seemed to care not for changing purpose into result. When need for vivacity ceased, he returned into gloom. His mental hermitage was always ready, where he could become a Trappist of the Carthusian variety. Voyaging over the wild regions of the earth had done him no good. Granby saw that his friend had not been happy out of society. The old wrong, whatever it was, rankled—but it was old. Might it not become out of date, obsolete? No man can ever forget, no man wishes to forget; but he can console himself. Why could not Mr. Waddy love, or like in the range of loving, someone who might be made a wife of? That would distract him—in one or other sense.
“There is the beautiful Clara, his cousin. How happy might a man be in loving her,” thought Granby, with a sigh for himself. “That fancy of hers which I have detected for Dunstan, will pass away when she sees he is Diana’s. Of course Waddy is charmed with Clara. I believe the dog actually presumes upon his kinsmanship and youthful antiquity to the point of a kiss—confound him!”