Portia - Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (top 100 books of all time checklist txt) 📗

well; it all lies in a nutshell. It is an old story, too; one has so often heard it. A bad son--dissipated--in perpetual hot water. A devoted father. Then, one day, a very bad story comes, and the son has to fly the country. And then, some time afterward, news comes of his death. Slyme never saw him again. He broods over that, I think; at least, he has never been the same man since the son, Matthew, left England. It was all a very unhappy business."

"For the father, perhaps. For the son, he had more than ordinary luck to die as soon as he did," says Fabian. He does not speak at all bitterly. Only hopelessly, and without heart or feeling.

"Nobody knows how old Gregory got him out of the country so cleverly," says Sir Christopher. "It was a marvel how he managed to elude the grasp of the law."

"He satisfied the one principal creditor, I suppose?" says Fabian, indifferently.

"Oh! impossible," says Sir Christopher. "It came to hundreds, you know; and he hadn't a farthing. Well, good-by; I'm off. Expect me and the bon-bons about dinner-hour."

He nods to Portia and Julia, who smile at him in return, and, kissing Dulce, quits the room.

Fabian, following him, goes on to the library; and, having desired one of the men to send the secretary, Slyme, to him, sits down at one of the tables and turns over leisurely the pages of accounts that lie there.

After a brief examination, he tells himself impatiently that they are somewhat muddled, or have, at least, been attended to in a most slovenly manner. He has just discovered a serious mistake in the row of figures that adorns the end of the second page, when the door opens slowly, and Gregory Slyme comes in.

"Wait one moment, Slyme," says Fabian, without looking up from the figures before him. A moment passes in utter silence. Then Fabian, still with his eyes upon the account, says, somewhat sharply: "Why, it is altogether wrong. It has been attended to with extreme carelessness. Did you, yourself, see to this matter of Younge's?"

He waits, apparently for an answer but none comes. Lifting his eyes he fixes them scrutinizingly on the old man before him, and having fixed them, lets them rest there in displeased surprise.

Slyme, beneath this steady gaze, grows visibly uneasy. His eyes shift uncomfortably from one object in the room to another; his limbs are unsteady; the hand resting on the table near him is shaking. His face betrays vacancy mixed with a cunning desire to hide from observation the heaviness and sluggishness that is overpowering him.

"Speak," says Fabian, sternly and remorselessly; "you can frame an answer, I suppose."

The old man mutters something that is almost unintelligible, so thick and husky are his tones. His eyes grow more restless;--mechanically, and as though unconscious of the act, he leans his body stupidly against the book-case near him.

"You are drunk," says Fabian, with slow scorn--"leave the room."

Having said this he turns again to his papers, as though from this moment contemptuously unaware of the other's presence.

Slyme attempts an explanation:

"You wrong me, sir," he says, in a thick uncertain voice--"I--I am ill--; my head is bad at times--I--"

"That will do," says Fabian, such ineffable disgust in his whole manner as makes the miserable, besotted old wretch before him actually cower. "No more lies. I have spoken to you already twice this week--and--; do you know what hour it is?--twelve o'clock! you begin your day early."

"I assure you, sir," begins Slyme again. But Fabian will not listen:

"Go," he says, briefly, with a disdainful motion of the hand, and in a tone not to be disobeyed. Slyme moves towards the door in his usual slouching fashion, but, as he reaches it, pauses, and for one instant lifts his heavy eyes, and lets them rest upon the young man at the distant table.

This one instant reveals his thoughts. In his glance there is fear, distrust, and, above and beyond all, a malignant and undying hatred--such a hatred as might project itself from the eyes of the traitor upon his victim. There is, too, upon Slyme's face a contortion of the muscles, that it would be sacrilege to call a smile, that is revengeful, and somehow suggests the possibility that this man, however impotent he may now appear, has, in some strange fashion, acquired a hidden and terrible power over the young man, who a moment since had treated him with such scorn and contumely.

The old secretary's countenance for this fateful moment is one brilliant, if wicked phantasmagoria, in which the ghosts of long sustained thoughts appear and disappear, going from fear and its brother, hatred, to lasting revenge. Then all vanish; the usual soddened look returns to the man's face; he opens the door, and once more, instead of the evil genius he looked a second ago, a broken-down, drunken old creature crosses the threshold, shambles over the hall, and is lost presently amongst the many passages.

* * * * *


Meantime, _ennui_ is reigning triumphantly in the drawing-room, more conspicuously in the case of Dulce.

"Hey-day," she says, with a little, idle yawn; "how I do wish everybody would not go out shooting, all at once. I think they might take it by turns. But all men are selfish; they never consider how lonely we may be."

"Why should one miss them?" says Julia, who in her soul considers every moment unoccupied by the society of a man (that is a possible lover) as time misspent.

"I don't know," says Dulce, candidly; "I am only sure of this, that I want them always."

Portia says nothing.

"Well, certainly, at times they are amusing," says Mrs. Beaufort, as though just awaking to the fact that now and again one _can_ find a man with some wit or humor in him--"and I honestly confess"--with a little laugh and a great assumption of candor--"that I wish even Stephen Gower would drop in now and help us to pass away an hour or two."

"_Even_ Stephen Gower!" repeats Dulce. "Julia, what has that poor young man done to you, that you should speak thus meanly of him? _Even_, what an unkind word!"

"I don't believe I quite meant it, do you know," says Julia, relenting. "I like Stephen Gower very much. By-the-by, what do you think of him? I never yet heard you express an opinion, good or bad, about him. Do it now."

Leaning back in her chair, Dulce slowly and thoughtfully raises her arms in the air, with her fingers tipping each other, until presently they fall indolently behind her head, where she lets them lie.

"Well, let me see," she says, lazily, "I think, perhaps, like Chaucer's man, he is a 'veray parfit gentil knight.'"

Portia lifts her eyes from her painting and turns them slowly upon her cousin; she regards her very silently for a moment or two, and then she smiles, and leaning forward, opens her lips.

"'And of his port as meke as is a mayde,'" she says, mischievously, purposely choosing the same poet for her quotation that Dulce had taken for hers.

Miss Blount laughs.

"You, too, are severe upon our neighbor," she says, defending him more from obstinacy than from real desire to see justice done. "I confess he is at times a trifle too mild, but not effeminate, surely?"

"He is very handsome," says Portia, evasively.

"He has a charming mouth," says Dulce.

"I think you ought only to look at Roger's mouth," says Julia, prudishly, whereupon Dulce shrugs her shoulders, impatiently, and, turning, devotes herself for the next ten minutes to the small artist lying at her feet--an attention received by the imperturbable Boodie with the most exasperating unconcern.

The afternoon wanes; day is sinking to its rest. Behind the tall dark firs "the great gold sun-god, blazing through the sky" may still be seen, but now he grows aweary, and would fain give place to his sister, the pale moon.

"The sweet keen smell--the sighing sound" of coming night is on the air. The restless ocean is rolling inland with a monotonous roar; there is scarcely sufficient breeze to ruffle the leaves of the huge chestnut that stands near one corner of the old house, not far from the balcony outside the drawing-room windows, where Mrs. Beaufort and the two girls are sitting.

The children are playing somewhere in the distance. Their sweet and merry voices come up to the balcony now and then, and mingle with the breath of descending night.

And now from beneath the fir trees two figures emerge, and come towards the stone steps where their hostess is sitting.

"Are you clean?" asks Dulce, with a charming smile, leaning over the railings to see them better as they draw closer.

"To confess a horrid truth, I don't believe we are," says Stephen Gower, glancing up at her, and regarding his rough shooting coat somewhat ruefully. "Will that admission exclude us from Paradise?"

"Dulce," says Dicky Browne, who is the second of the two figures, "I'm worn out. I've been walking all day, a thing I very seldom do; I have been firing off an unlimited number of cartridges, without, I am bound to confess--I am, as experience has doubtless taught you, a remarkably truthful person--without any very brilliant consequences, and I feel that very little more fatigue will be my death. Have compassion on us. We faint, we die; show mercy and give us some tea and some cake. You're awfully hungry, Gower, aren't you?"

"Well, not very," says Mr. Gower, too occupied in his contemplation of Dulce's charming face to be quite alive to what is so plainly expected of him.

"Oh, nonsense! He is tremendously hungry," says Dicky Browne. "Let us up, Dulce, and we will sit out there on the balcony, and won't soil anything. Except gore, there isn't much staining about us."

"But that is worse than anything," says Dulce with a shudder. "However, come up, and if you keep _very_ far away, I daresay I shan't mind much."

"Hard conditions," says Gower, in a lower tone.

So tea is got for them again, and the children, who always seem to _feel_ when plum-cake is to be had, come trooping noisily up the steps to join, uninvited, in the festivities.

Great content follows, and, indeed, all is peace until something said by the Boodie creates a confusion that sweeps calm to the winds. She has ensconced herself on Mr. Gower's knee, without saying so much as "by your leave" or "with your leave," and now, raising one soft little dimpled hand to his chin, turns his face towards her own, and for a full minute regards him with silent curiosity.

"Well, is your Highness satisfied?" says Gower, feeling amused.

The Boodie takes no notice of this enquiry. She puckers up her smooth brows as if puzzled, and then says, slowly--

"I don't believe one word of it!"

"Of what?" says Gower. Everybody by this time is looking at the Boodie, and the Boodie is steadfastly regarding Stephen Gower.

"It wasn't true what she said," goes on the Boodie, meditatively, "because you have hair on your lip. _Girls_ don't have hair on their lips--do they?"

"Not as a general rule," says Dicky Browne. "There _have_ been noble exceptions, but unhappily