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

do you mean?"

"I mean I do not count myself as a man--only a sort of inexplicable waif, a kind of cancelled man. A man without a past is like a child, or an idiot from birth, suddenly endowed with faculties."

"What nonsense, Fenwick! You have brooded and speculated over your condition until you have become morbid. Do now, as Sally would say, chuck the metaphysics."

"Perhaps I was getting too sententious over it. I'm sorry, and please I won't do so any more."

"Don't then. And now you'll see what will happen. You will remember everything quite suddenly. It will all come back in a flash, and oh, how glad you will be! And think of the joy of your wife and children!"

"Yes, and suppose all the while I am hating them for dragging me away from you----"

"From me and Sally?"

"I wasn't going to say Sally, but I don't want to keep her out. You and Sally, if you like. All I know is, if their reappearance were to bring with it a pleasure I cannot imagine--because I cannot imagine _them_--it would cut across my life, as it is now, in a way that would drive me _mad_. Indeed it would. How could I say to myself--as I say now, as I dare to say to you, knowing what I am--that to be here with you now is the greatest happiness of which I am capable."

"All that would change if you recovered them."

"Yes--yes--maybe! But I shrink from it; I shrink from _them_! They are strangers--nonentities. You are--you are--oh, it's no use----" He stopped suddenly.

"What am I?"

"It's no use beating about the bush. You are the centre of my life as it is, you are what I--all that is left of me--love best in the world! I cannot _now_ conceive the possibility of anything but hatred for what might come between us, for what might sever the existing link, whatever it may be--I care little what it is called, so long as I may keep it unbroken...."

"And I care nothing!" It was her eyes meeting his that stopped him. He could read the meaning of her words in them before they were spoken. Then he replied in a voice less firm than before:

"Dare we--knowing what I am, knowing what may come suddenly, any hour of the day, out of the unknown--_dare_ we call it love?" Perhaps in Fenwick's mind at this moment the predominant feeling was terror of the consequences to her that marriage with him might betray her into. It was much stronger than any misgiving (although a little remained) of her feelings toward himself.

"What else can we call it? It is a good old word." She said this quite calmly, with a very happy face one could see the flush of pleasure and success on even in the moonlight, and there was no reluctance, no shrinking in her, from her share of the outcome the Major had not waited to see. "Millais' Huguenot" was complete. Rosalind Graythorpe, or Palliser, stood there again with her husband's arm round her--her husband of twenty years ago! And in that fact was the keynote of what there was of unusual--of unconventional, one might almost phrase it--in her way of receiving and requiting his declaration. It hardly need be said that _he_ was unconscious of any such thing. A man whose soul is reeling with the intoxication of a new-found happiness is not overcritical about the exact movement of the hand that has put the cup to his lips.

The Huguenot arrangement might have gone on in the undisturbed moonlight till the chill of the morning came to break it up if a cab-wheel _crescendo_ and a _strepitoso_ peal at the bell had not announced Sally, who burst into the house and rushed into the drawing-room tumultuously, to be corrected back by a serious word from Ann, the door-opener, that Missis and Mr. Fenwick had stepped out in the garden. Ann's parade of her conviction that this was _en regle_, when no one said it wasn't, was suggestive in the highest degree. Professional perjury in a law-court could not have been more self-conscious. Probably Ann knew all about it, as well as cook. Sally saw nothing. She was too full of great events at Ladbroke Grove Road--the sort of events that are announced with a preliminary, What _do_ you think, N or M? And then develop the engagement of O to P, or the jilting of Q by R.

There was just time for a dozen words between the components of the Millais group in the moonlight.

"Shall we tell Sally?" It was the Huguenot that asked the question.

"Not just this minute. Wait till I can think. Perhaps I'll tell her upstairs. Now say good-bye before the chick comes, and go." And the chick came on the scene just too late to criticise the _pose_.

"I say, mother!" this with the greatest _empressement_ of which humanity and youth are capable. "I've got something I _must_ tell you!"

"What is it, kitten?"

"Tishy's head-over-ears in love with the shop-boy!"

"Sh-sh-sh-shish! You noisy little monkey, do consider! The neighbours will hear every word you say." So they will, probably, as Miss Sally's voice is very penetrating, and rings musically clear in the summer night. Her attitude is that she doesn't care if they do.

"Besides they're only cats! And _nobody_ knows who Tishy is, or the shop-boy. I'll come down and tell you all about it."

"We're coming up, darling!" You see, Sally had manifestoed down into the garden from the landing of the stair, which was made of iron openwork you knocked flower-pots down and broke, and you have had to have a new one--that, at least, is how Ann put it. On the stair-top Mrs. Nightingale stems the torrent of her daughter's revelation because it's so late and Mr. Fenwick must get away.

"You must tell him all about it another time."

"I don't know whether it's any concern of his."

"Taken scrupulous, are we, all of a sudden?" says Fenwick, laughing. "That cock won't fight, Miss Pussy! You'll have to tell me all about it when I come to-morrow. Good-night, Mrs. Nightingale." A sort of humorous formality in his voice makes Sally look from one to the other, but it leads to nothing. Sally goes to see Fenwick depart, and her mother goes upstairs with a candle. In a minute or so Sally pelts up the stairs, leaving Ann and the cook to thumbscrew on the shutter-panels of the street door, and make sure that housebreaker-baffling bells are susceptible.

"Do you know, mamma, I really _did_ think--what do you think I thought?"

"What, darling?"

"I thought Mr. Fenwick was going to kiss me!" In fact, Fenwick had only just remembered in time that family privileges must stand over till after the revelation.

"Should you have minded if he had?"

"_Not a bit!_ Why should _anybody_ mind Mr. Fenwick kissing them? You wouldn't yourself--you know you wouldn't! Come now, mother!"

"I shouldn't distress myself, poppet!" But words are mere wind; the manner of them is everything, and the foreground of her mother's manner suggests a background to Sally. She has smelt a rat, and suddenly fixes her eyes on a tell-tale countenance fraught with mysterious reserves.

"Mother, you _are_ going to marry Mr. Fenwick!" No change of type could do justice to the emphasis with which Sally goes straight to the point. Italics throughout would be weak. Her mother smiles as she fondles her daughter's excited face.

"I am, darling. So you may kiss him yourself when he comes to-morrow evening."

And Tishy's passion for the shop-boy had to stand over. But, as the Major had said, the mother and daughter talked till three in the morning--well, past two, anyhow!


CHAPTER XV


CONCERNING DR. VEREKER AND HIS MAMMA, WHO HAD KNOWN IT ALL ALONG. HOW SALLY LUNCHED WITH THE SALES WILSONS, AND GOT SPECULATING ABOUT HER FATHER. HOW TISHY LET OUT ABOUT MAJOR ROPER. HOW THERE WAS A WEDDING

The segment of a circle of Society that did duty for a sphere, in the case of Mrs. Nightingale and Sally, was collectively surprised when it heard of the intended marriage of the former, having settled in its own mind that the latter was the magnet to Mr. Fenwick's lodestone. But each several individual that composed it had, it seemed, foreseen exactly what was going to happen, and had predicted it in language that could only have been wilfully mistaken by persons interested in proving that the speaker was not a prophet. Exceptional insight had been epidemic. The only wonder was (to the individual speaker) that Mrs. Nightingale had remained single so long, and the only other wonder was that none of the other cases had seen it. They had evidently only taken seership mildly.

Dr. Vereker had a good opportunity of studying omniscience of a malignant type in the very well marked case of his own mother. You may remember Sally's denunciation of her as an old hen that came wobbling down on you. When her son (in the simplicity of his heart) announced to her as a great and curious piece of news that Mr. Fenwick was going to marry Mrs. Nightingale, she did not even look up from her knitting to reply: "What did I say to you, Conny?" For his name was Conrad, as Sally had reported. His discretion was not on the alert on this occasion, for he incautiously asked, "When?"

The good lady laid down her knitting on her knees, and folded her hands, interlacing her fingers, which were fat, as far as they would go, and leaning back with closed eyes--eyes intended to remain closed during anticipated patience.

"Fancy asking me that!" said she.

"Well, but--hang it!--_when?_"

"Do not use profane language, Conrad, in your mother's presence. Can you really ask me, 'When?' Try and recollect!"

Conrad appeared to consider; but as he had to contend with the problem of finding out when a thing had been said, the only clue to the nature of which was the date of its utterance, it was no great wonder that his cogitations ended in a shake of the head subdivided into its elements--shakes taken a brace at a time--and an expression of face as of one who whistles _sotto voce_. His questioner must have been looking between her eyelids, which wasn't playing fair; for she indicted him on the spot, and pushed him, as it were, into the dock.

"_That_, I suppose, means that I speak untruth. Very well, my dear!" Resignation set in.

"Come, mother, I say, now! Be a reasonable maternal parent. When did I say anybody spoke untruth?"

"My dear, you _said_ nothing. But if your father could have heard what you did _not_ say, you know perfectly well, my dear Conrad, what he would have _thought_. Was he likely to sit by and hear me insulted? Did he ever do so?"

The doctor was writing letters at a desk-table that he used for miscellaneous correspondence as much as possible, in order that this very same mother of his should be left alone as little as possible. He ended a responsible letter, and directed it, and made it a thing of the past with a stamp on it in a little basket on the hall-table outside. Then he came back to his mother, and bestowed on her the kiss, or peck, of peace. It always made him uncomfortable when he had to go away to the hospital under the shadow of dissension at home.

"Well, mother dear, what was it you really