The Captain, who, travelling by the mail, had arrived at eight o’clock, took his place at the breakfast-table at nine, and received for welcome a gruff nod from the Squire, and the tacit permission to grasp the knuckles which he grudgingly extended to him to shake.
In that little drama in which the old Squire chose now to figure, his son Charles was confoundedly in the way.
“Well, and what were you doin’ in Lunnon all this time?” grumbled Squire Harry when he had finished his rasher and his cup of coffee, after a long, hard look at Charles, who, in happy unconsciousness, crunched his toast, and read the county paper.
“I beg your pardon, sir, I didn’t hear—you were saying?” said Charles, looking up and lowering the paper.
“Hoo—yes—I was saying, I don’t think you went all the way to Lunnon to say your prayers in St. Paul’s; you’ve bin losing money in those hells and places; when your pocket’s full away you go and leave it wi’ them town blackguards, and back you come as empty as a broken sack to live on me, and so on. Come, now, how much rent do you take by the year from that place your fool of a mother left ye—the tartar!—hey?”
“I think, sir, about three hundred a year,” answered Charles.
“Three hundred and eighty,” said the old man, with a grin and a wag of his head. “I’m not so old that I can’t remember that—three hundred and eighty; and ye flung that away in Lunnon taverns and operas, on dancers and dicers, and ye come back here without a shillin’ left to bless yourself, to ride my horses and drink my wine; and ye call that fair play. Come along, here.”
And, followed by his mastiff, he marched stiffly out of the room.
Charles was surprised at this explosion, and sat looking after the grim old man, not knowing well what to make of it, for Squire Harry was openhearted enough, and never counted the cost of his hospitalities, and had never grudged him his home at Wyvern before.
“Much he knows about it,” thought Charles; “time enough, though. If I’m de trop here I can take my portmanteau and umbrella, and make my bow and go cheerfully.”
The tall Captain, however, did not look cheerful, but pale and angry, as he stood up and kicked the newspaper, which fell across his foot, fiercely. He looked out of the window, with one hand in his pocket, in sour rumination. Then he took his rod and flies and cigar-case, and strolled down to the river, where, in that engrossing and monotonous delight, celebrated of old by Venables and Walton, he dreamed away the dull hours.
Blessed resource for those mysterious mortals to whom nature accords it—stealing away, as they wander solitary along the devious riverbank, the memory, the remorse, and the miseries of life, like the flow and music of the shadowy Lethe.
This Captain did not look like the man his father had described him—an anxious man, rather than a man of pleasure—a man who was no sooner alone than he seemed to brood over some intolerable care, and, except during the exercise of his “gentle craft,” his looks were seldom happy or serene.
The hour of dinner came. A party of three, by no means well assorted. The old Squire in no genial mood and awfully silent. Charles silent and abstracted too; his body sitting there eating its dinner, and his soul wandering with black care and other phantoms by far-off Styx. The young lady had her own thoughts to herself, uncomfortable thoughts.
At last the Squire spoke to the intruder, with a look that might have laid him in the Red Sea.
“In my time young fellows were more alive, and had something to say for themselves. I don’t want your talk myself over my victuals, but you should ’a spoke to her—’tisn’t civil—’tweren’t the way in my day. I don’t think ye asked her ‘How are ye?’ since ye came back. Lunnon manners, maybe.”
“Oh, but I assure you I did. I could not have made such an omission. Alice will tell you I was not quite so stupid,” said Charles, raising his eyes, and looking at her.
“Not that it signifies, mind ye, the crack of a whip, whether ye did or no,” continued the Squire; “but ye may as well remember that ye’re not brother and sister exactly, and ye’ll call her Miss Maybell, and not Alice no longer.”
The Captain stared. The old Squire looked resolutely at the brandy-flask from which he was pouring into his tumbler. Alice Maybell’s eyes were lowered to the edge of her plate, and with the tip of her finger she fiddled with the crumbs on the tablecloth. She did not know what to say, or what might be coming.
So soon as the Squire had quite compounded his brandy-and-water he lifted his surly eyes to his son with a flush on his aged cheek, and wagged his head with oracular grimness, and silence descended again for a time upon the three kinsfolk.
This uncomfortable party, I suppose, were off again, each on their own thoughts, in another minute. But no one said a word for some time.
“By the by, Alice—Miss Maybell, I mean—I saw in London a little picture that would have interested you,” said the Captain, “an enamelled miniature of Marie Antoinette, a pretty little thing, only the size of your watch; you can’t think how spirited and beautiful it was.”
“And why the dickens didn’t ye buy it, and make her a
