Part 55 (2/2)
Mr. Avenel's fingers itched to knock the tinker's villanous hat off his jacobinical head, but he repressed the undignified impulse by thrusting both hands deep into his trousers' pockets.
”A tinker!” he cried,--”that's a vagrant; and I'm a magistrate, and I've a great mind to send you to the treadmill,--that I have. What do you do here, I say? You have not answered my question.”
”What does I do 'ere?” said Mr. Sprott. ”Vy, you had better ax my crakter of the young gent I saw you talking with just now; he knows me.”
”What! my nephew knows you?”
”W-hew,” whistled the tinker, ”your nephew is it, sir? I have a great respek for your family. I 've knowed Mrs. Fairfilt the vashervoman this many a year. I 'umbly ax your pardon.” And he took off his hat this time.
Mr. Avenel turned red and white in a breath. He growled out something inaudible, turned on his heel, and strode off. The tinker watched him as he had watched Leonard, and then dogged the uncle as he had dogged the nephew. I don't presume to say that there was cause and effect in what happened that night, but it was what is called ”a curious coincidence”
that that night one of Richard Avenel's ricks was set on fire, and that that day he had called Mr. Sprott an incendiary. Mr. Sprott was a man of a very high spirit, and did not forgive an insult easily. His nature was inflammatory, and so was that of the lucifers which he always carried about him, with his tracts and glue-pots.
The next morning there was an inquiry made for the tinker, but he had disappeared from the neighbourhood.
CHAPTER XVI.
It was a fortunate thing that the dejeune dansant so absorbed Mr.
Richard Avenel's thoughts that even the conflagration of his rick could not scare away the graceful and poetic images connected with that pastoral festivity. He was even loose and careless in the questions he put to Leonard about the tinker; nor did he send justice in pursuit of that itinerant trader; for, to say truth, Richard Avenel was a man accustomed to make enemies amongst the lower orders; and though he suspected Mr. Sprott of destroying his rick, yet, when he once set about suspecting, he found he had quite as good cause to suspect fifty other persons. How on earth could a man puzzle himself about ricks and tinkers when all his cares and energies were devoted to a dejeune dansant? It was a maxim of Richard Avenel's, as it ought to be of every clever man, ”to do one thing at a time;” and therefore he postponed all other considerations till the dejeune dansant was fairly done with. Amongst these considerations was the letter which Leonard wished to write to the parson. ”Wait a bit, and we will both write!” said Richard, good-humouredly, ”the moment the dijeune dansant is over!”
It must be owned that this fete was no ordinary provincial ceremonial.
Richard Avenel was a man to do a thing well when he set about it,--
”He soused the cabbage with a bounteous heart.”
By little and little his first notions had expanded, till what had been meant to be only neat and elegant now embraced the costly and magnificent. Artificers accustomed to dejeunes dansants came all the way from London to a.s.sist, to direct, to create. Hungarian singers and Tyrolese singers and Swiss peasant-women, who were to chant the Ranz des Vaches, and milk cows or make syllabubs, were engaged. The great marquee was decorated as a Gothic banquet-hall; the breakfast itself was to consist of ”all the delicacies of the season.” In short, as Richard Avenel said to himself, ”It is a thing once in a way; a thing on which I don't object to spend money, provided that the thing is--the thing!”
It had been a matter of grave meditation how to make the society worthy of the revel; for Richard Avenel was not contented with the mere aristocracy of the town,--his ambition had grown with his expenses.
”Since it will cost so much,” said he, ”I may as well come it strong, and get in the county.”
True, that he was personally acquainted with very few of what are called county families. But still, when a man makes himself a mark in a large town, and can return one of the members whom that town sends to parliament; and when, moreover, that man proposes to give some superb and original entertainment, in which the old can eat and the young can dance, there is no county in the island that has not families enow who will be delighted by an invitation from THAT MAN. And so Richard, finding that, as the thing got talked of, the dean's lady, and Mrs.
Pompley, and various other great personages, took the liberty to suggest that Squire this, and Sir somebody that, would be so pleased if they were asked, fairly took the bull by the horns, and sent out his cards to Park, Hall, and Rectory, within a circ.u.mference of twelve miles. He met with but few refusals, and he now counted upon five hundred guests.
”In for a penny in for a pound,” said Mr. Richard Avenel. ”I wonder what Mrs. M'Catchley will say?” Indeed, if the whole truth must be known,--Mr. Richard Avenel not only gave that dejeune dansant in honour of Mrs. M'Catchley, but he had fixed in his heart of hearts upon that occasion (when surrounded by all his splendour, and a.s.sisted by the seductive arts of Terpsich.o.r.e and Bacchus) to whisper to Mrs. M'Catchley those soft words which--but why not here let Mr. Richard Avenel use his own idiomatic and unsophisticated expression? ”Please the pigs, then,”
said Mr. Avenel to himself, ”I shall pop the question!”
CHAPTER XVII.
The Great Day arrived at last; and Mr. Richard Avenel, from his dressing-room window, looked on the scene below as Hannibal or Napoleon looked from the Alps on Italy. It was a scene to gratify the thought of conquest, and reward the labours of ambition. Placed on a little eminence stood the singers from the mountains of the Tyrol, their high-crowned hats and filigree b.u.t.tons and gay sashes gleaming in the sun. Just seen from his place of watch, though concealed from the casual eye, the Hungarian musicians lay in ambush amidst a little belt of laurels and American shrubs. Far to the right lay what had once been called horresco referens the duckpond, where--”Dulce sonant tenui gutture carmen aves.” But the ruthless ingenuity of the head-artificer had converted the duck-pond into a Swiss lake, despite grievous wrong and sorrow to the a.s.suetum innocuumque genus,--the familiar and harmless inhabitants, who had been all expatriated and banished from their native waves. Large poles twisted with fir branches, stuck thickly around the lake, gave to the waters the becoming Helvetian gloom. And here, beside three cows all bedecked with ribbons, stood the Swiss maidens destined to startle the shades with the Ranz des Vaches. To the left, full upon the sward, which it almost entirely covered, stretched the great Gothic marquee, divided into two grand sections,--one for the dancing, one for the dejeune.
The day was propitious,--not a cloud in the sky. The musicians were already tuning their instruments; figures of waiters hired of Gunter--trim and decorous, in black trousers and white waistcoats--pa.s.sed to and fro the s.p.a.ce between the house and marquee.
Richard looked and looked; and as he looked he drew mechanically his razor across the strop; and when he had looked his fill, he turned reluctantly to the gla.s.s and shaved! All that blessed morning he had been too busy, till then, to think of shaving.
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