Armadale

'Thank you, ma'am,' said Allan. 'Now I shall get on smoothly. 'Oh, weep for the hour when to Eveleen's Bower, the lord of the valley with false vows came. The moon was shining bright—''

'No!' said Mrs. Pentecost.

'I beg your pardon, ma'am,' remonstrated Allan. ''The moon was shining bright—''

'The moon wasn't doing anything of the kind,' said Mrs. Pentecost.

Pedgift Junior, foreseeing a dispute, persevered sotto voce with the accompaniment, in the interests of harmony.

'Moore's own words, ma'am,' said Allan, 'in my mother's copy of the Melodies.'

'Your mother's copy was wrong,' retorted Mrs. Pentecost. 'Didn't I tell you just now that I knew Tom Moore by heart?'

Pedgift Junior's peace-making concertina still flourished and groaned in the minor key.

'Well, what did the moon do?' asked Allan, in despair.

'What the moon ought to have done, sir, or Tom Moore wouldn't have written it so,' rejoined Mrs. Pentecost. ''The moon hid her light from the heaven that night, and wept behind her clouds o'er the maiden's shame!' I wish that young man would leave off playing,' added Mrs. Pentecost, venting her rising irritation on Gustus Junior. 'I've had enough of him—he tickles my ears.'

'Proud, I'm sure, ma'am,' said the unblushing Pedgift. 'The whole science of music consists in tickling the ears.'

'We seem to be drifting into a sort of argument,' remarked Major Milroy, placidly. 'Wouldn't it be better if Mr. Armadale went on with his song?'

'Do go on, Mr. Armadale!' added the major's daughter. 'Do go on, Mr. Pedgift!'

'One of them doesn't know the words, and the other doesn't know the music,' said Mrs. Pentecost. 'Let them go on if they can!'

'Sorry to disappoint you, ma'am,' said Pedgift Junior; 'I'm ready to go on myself to any extent. Now, Mr. Armadale!'

Allan opened his lips to take up the unfinished melody where he had last left it. Before he could utter a note, the curate suddenly rose, with a ghastly face, and a hand pressed convulsively over the middle region of his waistcoat.

'What's the matter?' cried the whole boating party in chorus.

'I am exceedingly unwell,' said the Reverend Samuel Pentecost. The boat was instantly in a state of confusion. 'Eveleen's Bower' expired on Allan's lips, and even the irrepressible concertina of Pedgift was silenced at last. The alarm proved to be quite needless. Mrs. Pentecost's son possessed a mother, and that mother had a bag. In two seconds the art of medicine occupied the place left vacant in the attention of the company by the art of music.

'Rub it gently, Sammy,' said Mrs. Pentecost. 'I'll get out the bottles and give you a dose. It's his poor stomach, major. Hold my trumpet, somebody—and stop the boat. You take that bottle, Neelie, my dear; and you take this one, Mr. Armadale; and give them to me as I want them. Ah, poor dear, I know what's the matter with him! Want of power here, major—cold, acid, and flabby. Ginger to warm him; soda to correct him; sal volatile to hold him up. There, Sammy! drink it before it settles; and then go and lie down, my dear, in that dog-kennel of a place they call the cabin. No more music!' added Mrs. Pentecost, shaking her forefinger at the proprietor of the concertina—'unless it's a hymn, and that I don't object to.'

Nobody appearing to be in a fit frame of mind for singing a hymn, the all-accomplished Pedgift drew upon his stores of local knowledge, and produced a new idea. The course of the boat was immediately changed under his direction. In a few minutes more, the company found themselves in a little island creek, with a lonely cottage at the far end of it, and a perfect forest of reeds closing the view all round them. 'What do you say, ladies and gentlemen, to stepping on shore and seeing what a reed-cutter's cottage looks like?' suggested young Pedgift.

'We say yes, to be sure,' answered Allan. 'I think our spirits have been a little dashed by Mr. Pentecost's illness and Mrs. Pentecost's bag,' he added, in a whisper to Miss Milroy. 'A change of this sort is the very thing we want to set us all going again.'

He and young Pedgift handed Miss Milroy out of the boat. The major followed. Mrs. Pentecost sat immovable as the Egyptian Sphinx, with her bag on her knees, mounting guard over 'Sammy' in the cabin.

'We must keep the fun going, sir,' said Allan, as he helped the major over the side of the boat. 'We haven't half done yet with the enjoyment of the day.'

His voice seconded his hearty belief in his own prediction to such good purpose that even Mrs. Pentecost heard him, and ominously shook her head.

'Ah!' sighed the curate's mother, 'if you were as old as I am, young gentleman, you wouldn't feel quite so sure of the enjoyment of the day!'

So, in rebuke of the rashness of youth, spoke the caution of age. The negative view is notoriously the safe view, all the world over, and the Pentecost philosophy is, as a necessary consequence, generally in the right.

IX. FATE OR CHANCE?

It was close on six o'clock when Allan and his friends left the boat, and the evening influence was creeping already, in its mystery and its stillness, over the watery solitude of the Broads.

The shore in these wild regions was not like the shore elsewhere. Firm as it looked, the garden ground in front of the reed-cutter's cottage was floating ground, that rose and fell and oozed into puddles under the pressure of the foot. The boatmen who guided the visitors warned them to keep to the path, and pointed through gaps in the reeds and pollards to grassy places, on which strangers would have walked confidently, where the crust of earth was not strong enough to bear the weight of a child over the unfathomed depths of slime and water beneath. The solitary cottage, built of planks pitched black, stood on ground that had been steadied and strengthened by resting it on piles. A little wooden tower rose at one end of the roof, and served as a lookout post in the fowling season. From this elevation the eye ranged far and wide over a wilderness of winding water and lonesome marsh. If the reed-