"My medical adviser? Oh, he's all right. Never mind him; talk about mother."
"They must be very nearly at Rheims by now." This is mere obedience to orders on the Major's part. He feels no real interest in what he is saying.
"How rum it must be!" says Sally, with grave consideration. And the Major's "What?" evolves that "it" means marrying a second husband.
"Going through it all over again when you've done it once before," continues this young philosopher. The Major thinks of asking why it should be rummer the second time than the first, but decides not to, and sips his toddy, and pats the hand that is under his. In a hazy, fossil-like way he perceives that to a young girl's mind the "rumness" of a second husband is exactly proportionate to the readiness of its acceptance of the first. Unity is just as intrinsic a quality of a first husband as the colour of his eyes or hair. Moreover, he is expected to outlive you. Above all, he is perfectly natural and a matter of course. We discern in all this a sneaking tribute to an idea of a hereafter; but the Major didn't go so far as that.
"She looked very jolly over it," said he, retreating on generalities. "So did he."
"Gaffer Fenwick? I should think so indeed! Well he might!" Then, after a moment's consideration: "He looked like my idea of
Sir Richard Grenville. It's only an idea. I forget what he did. Elizabethan johnny."
"What do you call him? Gaffer Fenwick? You're a nice, respectable young monkey! Well, he's not half a bad-looking fellow; well set up." But none of this, though good in itself, is what Sally sat down to talk about. A sudden change in her manner, a new earnestness, makes the Major stop an incipient yawn he is utilising as an exordium to a hint that we ought to go to bed, and become quite wakeful to say: "I will tell you all I can, my child." For Sally has thrust aside talk of the day's events, making no more of the wedding ceremony than of "Charley's Aunt," with: "Why did my father and mother part? You will tell me now, won't you, Major dear?"
Lying was necessary—inevitable. But he would minimise it. There was always the resource of the legal fiction; all babes born in matrimony are legally the children of their mother's husband, quand-même. He must make that his sheet-anchor.
"You know, Sallykin, your father and mother fell out before you were born. And the first time I saw your mother—why, bless my soul, my dear! you were quite a growing girl—yes, able to get a staff-officer's thumb in your mouth, and bite it. Indeed, you did! It was General Pellew; they say he's going to be made a peer." The Major thinks he sees his way out of the fire by sinking catechism in reminiscences. "I can recollect it all as if it were yesterday. I said to him, 'Who's the poor pretty little mother, General?' Because he knew your mother, and I didn't. 'Don't you know?' said he. 'She's Mrs. Graythorpe.' I asked about her husband, but Pellew had known nothing except that there was a row, and they had parted." The Major's only fiction here was that he substituted the name Graythorpe for Palliser. "Next time I saw her we picked up some acquaintance, and she asked if I was a Lincolnshire Lund, because her father always used to talk of how he went to Lund's father's, near Crowland, when he was a boy. 'Stop a bit,' said I; 'what was your father's name?' 'Paul Nightingale,' says she." Observe that nothing was untrue in this, because Rosey always spoke and thought of Paul Nightingale as her father.