course any decipherable postmark; and upon the back of the thing was written: 'His has been the summer air, and the sunshine, and the flowers; and gentle ears have listened to him, and gentle eyes have been upon him. Let others eat his honey that please, so that he has had his morsel and his song.'
I thought it was a joke of some sort.
Then it occurred to me that this might be—somehow—Elena's answer. It was an interpretation which probably appealed to the Supernal Aristophanes.
23.
1
But now the spring was come again, and, as always at this season, I was pricked with vague longings to have done with roofs and paven places. I wanted to be in the open. I think I wanted to fall in love with somebody, and thereby somewhat to prolong the daily half-minute, immediately after awakening in the morning, during which I did not think about Elena Risby.
I was bored in Lichfield. For nothing of much consequence seemed, as I yawned over the morning paper, to be happening anywhere. The Illinois Legislature had broken up in a free fight, a British square had been broken in Somaliland, and at the Aqueduct track Alado had broken his jockey's neck. A mob had chased a negro up Broadway: Russia had demanded that China cede the sovereignty of Manchuria; and Dr. Lyman Abbott was explaining why the notion of equal suffrage had been abandoned finally by thinking people.
Such negligible matters contributed not at all to the comfort or the discomfort of Robert Etheridge Townsend; and I was pricked with vague sweet longings to have done with roofs and paven places. If only I possessed a country estate, a really handsome Manor or a Grange, I was reflecting as I looked over the 'Social Items,' and saw that Miss Hugonin and Colonel Hugonin had re-opened Selwoode for the summer months….
So I decided I would go to Gridlington, whither Peter Blagden had forgotten to invite me. He was extremely glad to see me, though, to do him justice. For Peter—by this time the inheritor of his unlamented uncle's estate,— had, very properly, developed gout, which is, I take it, the time-honoured appendage of affluence and, so to speak, its trade-mark; and was, for all his wealth, unable to get up and down the stairs of his fine house without, as we will delicately word it, the display and, at times, the overtaxing of a copious vocabulary.
2
I was at Gridlington entirely comfortable. It was spring, to begin with, and out of doors in spring you always know, at twenty-five, that something extremely pleasant is about to happen, and that She is quite probably around the very next turn of the lane.
Moreover, there was at Gridlington a tiny private garden which had once been the recreation of Peter Blagden's aunt (dead now twelve years ago), and which had remained untended since her cosseting; and I in nature took charge of it.
There was in the place a wilding peach-tree, which I artistically sawed into shape and pruned and grafted, and painted all those profitable wounds with tar; and I grew to love it, just as most people do their children, because it was mine. And Peter, who is a person of no sensibility, wanted to ring for a servant one night, when there was a hint of frost and I had started out to put a bucket of water under my tree to protect it. I informed him that he was irrevocably dead to all the nobler sentiments, and went to the laundry and got a wash-tub.
Peter was not infrequently obtuse. He would contend, for instance, that it was absurd for any person to get so gloriously hot and dirty while setting out plants, when that person objected to having a flower in the same room. For Peter could not understand that a cut flower is a dead or, at best, a dying thing, and therefore to considerate people is just so much abhorrent carrion; and denied it would be really quite as rational to decorate your person or your dinner table with the severed heads of chickens as with those of daffodils.
'But that is only because you are not particularly bright,' I told him. 'Oh, I suppose you can't help it. But why make
Whereupon Mr. Blagden desired to be informed if I considered those with-various-adjectives-accompanied twinges in that qualified foot to be a source of personal pleasure to the owner of the very-extensively-hiatused foot. In which case, Mr. Blagden felt at liberty to express his opinion of my intellectual attainments, which was of an uncomplimentary nature.
'Because, you know,' I pursued, equably, 'you wouldn't have the gout if you did not habitually overeat yourself and drink more than is good for you. In consequence, here you are at thirty-two with a foot the same general size and shape as a hayrick, only rather less symmetrical, and quite unable to attend to the really serious business of life, which is to present me to the heiress. It is a case of vicarious punishment which strikes me as extremely unfair. You have made of your stomach a god, Peter, and I am the one to suffer for it. You have made of your stomach,' I continued, venturing aspiringly into metaphor, 'a brazen Moloch, before which you are now calmly preparing to immolate my prospects in life. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Peter!'
Mr. Blagden's next observation was describable as impolite.
'Fate, too,' I lamented, in a tragic voice, 'appears to have entered into this nefarious conspiracy. Here, not two miles away, is one of the greatest heiresses in America,—clever, I am told, beautiful, I am sure, for I have yet to discover a woman who sees anything in the least attractive about her,—and, above all, with the Woods millions at her disposal. Why, Peter, Margaret Hugonin is the woman I have been looking for these last three years. She is, to a hair, the sort of woman I have always intended to make unhappy. And I can't even get a sight of her! Here are you, laid up with the gout, and unable to help me; and yonder is the heiress, making a foolish pretence at mourning for the old curmudgeon who left her all that money, and declining to meet people. Oh, but she is a shiftless woman, Peter! At this very moment she might be getting better acquainted with me; at this very moment, Peter, I might be explaining to her in what points she is utterly and entirely different from all the other women I have ever known. And she prefers to immure herself in Selwoode, with no better company than her father, that ungodly old retired colonel, and a she-cousin, somewhere on the undiscussable side of forty—when she might be engaging me in amorous dalliance! That Miss Hugonin is a shiftless woman, I tell you! And Fate—oh, but Fate, too, is a vixenish jade!' I cried, and shook my fist under the nose of an imaginary Lachesis.
'You appear,' said Peter, drily, 'to be unusually well-informed as to what is going on at Selwoode.'
'You flatter me,' I answered, as with proper modesty. 'You must remember that there are maids at Selwoode. You must remember that my man Byam, is—and will be until that inevitable day when he will attempt to blackmail me, and I shall kill him in the most lingering fashion I can think of,—that Byam is, I say, something of a diplomatist.'
Mr. Blagden regarded me with disapproval.
'So you've been sending your nigger cousin over to Selwoode to spy for you! You're a damn cad, you know, Bob,' he pensively observed. 'Now most people think that when you carry on like a lunatic you're simply acting on impulse. I don't. I believe you plan it out a week ahead. I sometimes think you are the most adroit and unblushing looker-out for number one I ever knew; and I can't for the life of me understand why I don't turn you out of doors.'
'I don't know where you picked up your manners,' said I, reflectively, 'but it must have been in devilish low company. I would cut your acquaintance, Peter, if I could afford it.' Then I fell to pacing up and down the floor. 'I incline, as you have somewhat grossly suggested, to a certain favouritism among the digits. And why the deuce shouldn't I? A fortune is the only thing I need. I have good looks, you know, of a sort; ah, I'm not vain, but both my glass and a number of women have been kind enough to reassure me on this particular point. And that I have a fair
