Clive told me of this little circumstance, and I am sorry to say of his own subsequent ill behaviour. “We were standing apart from the ladies,” so Clive narrated, “when Barnes and I had our little passage-of-arms. He had tried the finger business upon me before, and I had before told him, either to shake hands or to leave it alone. You know the way in which the impudent little beggar stands astride, and sticks his little feet out. I brought my heel well down on his confounded little varnished toe, and gave it a scrunch which made Mr. Barnes shriek out one of his loudest oaths.”
“D—— clumsy ——!” screamed out Barnes.
Clive said, in a low voice, “I thought you only swore at women, Barnes.”
“It is you that say things before women, Clive,” cries his cousin, looking very furious.
Mr. Clive lost all patience. “In what company, Barnes, would you like me to say, that I think you are a snob? Will you have it on the Parade? Come out and I will speak to you.”
“Barnes can’t go out on the Parade,” cries Lord Kew, bursting out laughing: “there’s another gentleman there wanting him.” And two of the three young men enjoyed this joke exceedingly. I doubt whether Barnes Newcome Newcome, Esq., of Newcome, was one of the persons amused.
“What wickedness are you three boys laughing at?” cries Lady Anne, perfectly innocent and good-natured; “no good, I will be bound. Come here, Clive.” Our young friend, it must be premised, had no sooner received the thrust of Lady Kew’s two fingers on entering, than it had been intimated to him that his interview with that gracious lady was at an end. For she had instantly called her daughter to her, with whom her ladyship fell a-whispering; and then it was that Clive retreated from Lady Kew’s hand, to fall into Barnes’s.
“Clive trod on Barnes’s toe,” cries out cheery Lord Kew, “and has hurt Barnes’s favourite corn, so that he cannot go out, and is actually obliged to keep the room. That’s what we were laughing at.”
“Hem!” growled Lady Kew. She knew to what her grandson alluded. Lord Kew had represented Jack Belsize, and his thundering big stick, in the most terrific colours to the family council. The joke was too good a one not to serve twice.
Lady Anne, in her whispered conversation with the old Countess, had possibly deprecated her mother’s anger towards poor Clive, for when he came up to the two ladies, the younger took his hand with great kindness, and said, “My dear Clive, we are very sorry you are going. You were of the greatest use to us on the journey. I am sure you have been uncommonly good-natured and obliging, and we shall all miss you very much.” Her gentleness smote the generous young fellow, and an emotion of gratitude towards her for being so compassionate to him in his misery, caused his cheeks to blush and his eyes perhaps to moisten. “Thank you, dear aunt,” says he, “you have been very good and kind to me. It is I that shall feel lonely; but—but it is quite time that I should go to my work.”