Now, Rosa thought of this unlucky quarrel a great deal, and thought of it with an uncomfortable feeling that she was involved in it, as cause, or consequence, or whatnot, through being in a false position altogether as to her marriage engagement. Never free from such uneasiness when she was with her affianced husband, it was not likely that she would be free from it when they were apart. Today, too, she was cast in upon herself, and deprived of the relief of talking freely with her new friend, because the quarrel had been with Helena’s brother, and Helena undisguisedly avoided the subject as a delicate and difficult one to herself. At this critical time, of all times, Rosa’s guardian was announced as having come to see her.
Mr. Grewgious had been well selected for his trust, as a man of incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate quality discernible on the surface. He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature that his face presented, was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said: “I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is.”
With too great length of throat at his upper end, and too much anklebone and heel at his lower; with an awkward and hesitating manner; with a shambling walk; and with what is called a near sight—which perhaps prevented his observing how much white cotton stocking he displayed to the public eye, in contrast with his black suit—Mr. Grewgious still had some strange capacity in him of making on the whole an agreeable impression.
Mr. Grewgious was discovered by his ward, much discomfited by being in Miss Twinkleton’s company in Miss Twinkleton’s own sacred room. Dim forebodings of being examined in something, and not coming well out of it, seemed to oppress the poor gentleman when found in these circumstances.
“My dear, how do you do? I am glad to see you. My dear, how much improved you are. Permit me to hand you a chair, my dear.”
Miss Twinkleton rose at her little writing-table, saying, with general sweetness, as to the polite Universe: “Will you permit me to retire?”
“By no means, madam, on my account. I beg that you will not move.”
“I must entreat permission to move,” returned Miss Twinkleton, repeating the word with a charming grace; “but I will not withdraw, since you are so obliging. If I wheel my desk to this corner window, shall I be in the way?”
“Madam! In the way!”
“You are very kind.—Rosa, my dear, you will be under no restraint, I am sure.”
Here Mr. Grewgious, left by the fire with Rosa, said again: “My dear, how do you do? I am glad to see you, my dear.” And having waited for her to sit down, sat down himself.
“My visits,” said Mr. Grewgious, “are, like those of the angels—not that I compare myself to an angel.”
“No, sir,” said Rosa.
“Not by any means,” assented Mr. Grewgious. “I merely refer to my visits, which are few and far between. The angels are, we know very well, upstairs.”
Miss Twinkleton looked round with a kind of stiff stare.
“I refer, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, laying his hand on Rosa’s, as the possibility thrilled through his frame of his otherwise seeming to take the awful liberty of calling Miss Twinkleton my dear; “I refer to the other young ladies.”
Miss Twinkleton resumed her writing.
Mr. Grewgious, with a sense of not having managed his opening point quite as neatly as he might have desired, smoothed his head from back to front as if he had just dived, and were pressing the water out—this smoothing action, however superfluous, was habitual with him—and took a pocketbook from his coat-pocket, and a stump of black-lead pencil from his waistcoat-pocket.
“I made,” he said, turning the leaves: “I made a guiding memorandum or so—as I usually do, for I have no conversational powers whatever—to which I will, with your permission, my dear, refer. ‘Well and happy.’ Truly. You are well and happy, my dear? You look so.”
“Yes, indeed, sir,” answered Rosa.
“For which,” said Mr. Grewgious, with a bend of his head towards the corner window, “our warmest acknowledgments are due, and I am sure are rendered, to the maternal kindness and the constant care and consideration of the lady whom I have now the honour to see before me.”
This point, again, made but a lame departure from Mr. Grewgious, and never got to its destination; for, Miss Twinkleton, feeling that the courtesies required her to be by this time quite outside the conversation, was biting the end of her pen, and looking upward, as waiting for the descent of an idea from any member of the Celestial Nine who might have one to spare.
Mr. Grewgious smoothed his smooth head again, and then made another reference to his pocketbook; lining out “well and happy,” as disposed of.
“ ‘Pounds, shillings, and pence,’ is my next note. A dry subject for a young lady, but an important subject too. Life is pounds, shillings, and pence. Death is—” A sudden recollection of the death of her two parents seemed to stop him, and he said in a softer tone, and evidently inserting the negative as an afterthought: “Death is not pounds, shillings, and pence.”
His voice was as hard and dry as himself, and Fancy might have ground it straight, like himself, into high-dried snuff. And yet, through
