Somehow Good - William Frend De Morgan (the little red hen read aloud .TXT) 📗

she'll up and say, 'I suppose you mean that dam husband of mine.' Not she! Sensible woman that, sir--seen the world--knows a thing or two. You'll see she'll only say, 'That was Foodle or Parker or Stebbins or Jephson,' as may be, accordin' to the name."

We did not see our way to this enterprise, and said so. We drew a line; said there were things you could do, and things you couldn't do. The Major chuckled, and admitted this might be so; his old governor used to say, "Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines." The last two words remained behind in the cough, unless, indeed, they were shaken out off the Major's forefinger into a squeezed lemon that was awaiting its Seltzer.

"But I can tell you thing, Mr.," said he, forgetting our name, as soon as he felt soothed by the lemon-squash. "He didn't keep his name, that young man didn't. You may bet he didn't safely! Only, it's no use askin' me why, nor what he changed it to. If it _was_ him that was lost in the Bush in New South Wales, when I was at Sydney, why, of course that chap's _name_ was the same. I remember that much. Can't get hold of the name, though." He appeared to consult the pattern on his silk pocket-handkerchief as an oracle, and to await its answer with a thoughtful eye. Presently he blew his nose on the oracle, and returned it to his pocket, adding: "But it's a speculation--little speculation of my own. Don't _ask me_!" We saw, however, that more would come, without asking. And it came.

"It made a talk out there at the time. But _that_ didn't bring him to life. You may talk till you're hoarse, but you won't bring a dead man to--not when he's twenty miles off in a forest of gum-trees, as like as tallow-candles.... Oh yes, they had the natives put on the scent--black trackers, they call 'em--but, Lard! it was all no use. They only followed the scent of his horse, and the horse came back a fortnight after with them on his heels, an hour or so behind.... He'd only just left his party a moment, and meant to come back into the open. I suppose he thought he was sure to cross a cutting, and got trapped in the solid woodland."

"But what was the speculation? You said just now...."

"Not much to go by," said the Major, shaking a discouraging head. "Another joker with another name, who turned up a hundred miles off! Harrisson, I fancy--yes, Harrisson. It was only my idea they were the same. I came away, and don't know how they settled it."

"But something, Major Roper, must have made you think this man the same--the same as Jeremiah Indermaur, or whatever his name was--Mrs. Nightingale's man?"

"Somethin' must! What it was is another pair of shoes." He cogitated and reflected, but seemed to get no nearer. "You ask Pelloo," he said. "He might give you a tip." Then he called for a small glass of cognac, because the Seltzer was such dam chilly stuff, and the dry sherry was no use at all. We left him arranging the oracle over his face, with a view to a serious nap.

We got a few words shortly after with General Pellew, who seemed a little surprised at the Major's having referred to him for information.

"I don't know," said he, "why our friend Roper shouldn't recollect as much about it as I do. However, I do certainly remember that when this young gentleman, whatever his name was, left the station, he did go to Sydney or Melbourne, and I have some hazy recollection of some one saying that he was lost in the Bush. But why old Jack fancies he was found again or changed his name to Harrisson I haven't the slightest idea."

So that all we ourselves succeeded in getting at about Gerry may be said to have been the trap-door he vanished through. Whether Mrs. Nightingale got at other sources of information we cannot say. Whatever she learned she would be sure to keep her own counsel about. She may have concluded that the bones of the husband who had in a fit of anger deserted her had been picked by white ants, twenty years ago, in an Australian forest; or she may have come to know, by some means, of his resuscitation from the Bush, and his successes or failures in a later life elsewhere. We have had our own reasons for doubting that she ever knew that he took the name of Harrisson--if he really did--a point which seemed to us very uncertain, so far as the Major's narrative went. If she did get a scrap of tidings, a flying word, about him now and again, it was most likely all she got. And when she got it she would feel the danger of further inquiry--the difficulty of laying the reasons for her curiosity before her informant. You can't easily say to a stranger: "Oh, do tell us about Mrs. Jones or Mr. Smith. She or he is our divorced or separated wife or husband." A German might, but Mrs. Nightingale was not a German.

However, she _may_ have heard something about that Gerry, we grant you, in all those twenty long years. But if you ask us our opinion--our private opinion--it is that she scarcely heard of him, if she heard at all, and certainly never set eyes on him, until one day her madcap little daughter brought him home, half-killed by an electric shock, in a cab we were at some pains to describe accurately a few pages ago. And even then, had it not been for the individualities of that cab, she might have missed seeing him, and let him go away to the infirmary or the police-station, and probably never been near him again.

As it was, the face she saw when a freak of chance led to her following that cab, and looking in out of mere curiosity at its occupant, was the face of her old lover--of her husband. Eighteen--twenty--years had made a man of one who was then little more than a boy. The mark of the world he had lived in was on him; and it was the mark of a rough, strong world where one fights, and, if one is a man of this sort, maybe wins. But she never doubted his identity for a moment. And the way in which she grasped the situation--above all, the fact that he had not recognised her and would not recognise her--quite justified, to our thinking, Major Roper's opinion of her powers of self-command.

Nevertheless, these were not so absolute that her demeanour escaped comment from the cabby, the only witness of her first sight of the "electrocuted" man. He spoke of her afterwards as that squealing party down that sanguinary little turning off Shepherd's Bush Road he took that sanguinary galvanic shock to.


CHAPTER IX


HOW THOSE GIRLS DO CHATTER OVER THEIR MUSIC! MRS. NIGHTINGALE'S RESOLUTION. BUT, THE RISK! A HARD PART TO PLAY. THERE WAS ONLY MAMMA FOR THE GIRL! THE GARDEN OF LONG AGO

Two parts in a sestet, played alone, may be a maddening torture to a person whose musical imagination is not equal to supplying the other four. Perhaps you have heard Haydn, Op. 1704, and rejoiced in the logical consecutiveness of its fugues, the indisputableness of its well-classified statements, the swift pertinence of the repartees of the first violin to the second, the apt _resume_ and orderly reorganization of their epigrammatic interchanges by the 'cello and the double-bass, the steady typewritten report and summary of the whole by the pianoforte, and the regretful exception to so many points taken by the clarionet. If so, you have no doubt felt, as we have, a sense of perfect satisfaction at faultless musical structure, without having to surrender your soul unconditionally to the passionate appeal of a Beethoven, or to split your musical brains in conjectures about what Volkanikoffsky is driving at. You will find at the end that you have passed an hour or so of tranquil enjoyment, and are mighty content with yourself, the performers, and every one else.

But if you only hear the two parts, played alone, and your mental image of all the other parts is not strong enough to prevent your hearing the two performers count the bars while the non-performers don't do anything at all, you will probably go away and come back presently, or go mad.

Nobody else was there when Sally and Laetitia Wilson were counting four, and beginning too soon, and having to go back and begin all over again, and missing a bar, and knocking down their music-stands when they had to turn over quick. So nobody went mad. Mamma had gone to an anti-vaccination meeting, and Athene had gone to stay over Bank Holiday at Leighton Buzzard, and the boys had gone to skate, and papa was in his study and didn't matter, and they had the drawing-room to themselves. Oh dear, how very often they did count four, to be sure!

Sally was _distraite_, and wasn't paying proper attention to the music. Whenever a string had to be tightened by either, Sally introduced foreign matter. Laetitia was firm and stern (she was twenty-four, if you please!), and wouldn't respond. As thus, in a tightening-up pause:

"I like him awfully, you know, Tishy. In fact, I love him. It's a pleasure to hear him come into the house. Only--one's _mother_, you know! It's the _oddity_ of it!"

"Yes, dear. _Now_, are you ready?... It only clickets down because you will _not_ screw in; it's no use turning and leaving the key sloppy...."

"I know, Tishy dear--teach your granny! There, I think that's right now. But it _is_ funny when it's one's mother, isn't it?"

"One--two--three--four! There--you didn't begin! Remember, you've got to begin on the demisemiquaver at the end of the bar--only not too staccato, remember--and allow for the pause. Now--one, two, three, four, and you begin--in the _middle_ of four--_not_ the end. Oh dear! Now once more...." etc.

You will at once see from this that Sally had lost no time in finding a confidante for the fossil's communication.

An hour and a half of resolute practising makes you not at all sorry for an oasis in the counting, which you inaugurate (or whatever you do when it's an oasis) by smashing the top coal and making a great blaze. And then you go ever so close, and can talk.

"Are you sure it isn't Colonel Lund's mistake? Old gentlemen get very fanciful." Thus Miss Wilson. But it seems Sally hasn't much doubt. Rather the other way round, if anything!

"I thought it might be, all the way to Norland Square. Then I changed my mind coming up the hill. Of course, I don't know about mamma till I ask her. But I expect the Major's right about Mr. Fenwick."

"But how does _he_ know? How do you know?"

"I don't know." Sally tastes the points of a holly-leaf with her tongue-tip, discreetly, to see how sharp they are, and cogitates. "At least," she continues, "I _do_ know. He never takes his eyes off mamma from the minute he comes into the house."

"Oh!"

"Besides--lots of things! Oh no; as far as that goes, I should say _he_ was spooney."

"I see. You're a vulgar child, all the same! But about your mother--that's the point."

The vulgar child cogitates still more gravely.

"I should say _now_," she says, after thinking it over, "that--only I never noticed it at the time, you know----"

"That what?"

"That