Part 20 (2/2)
”And I would I were back in Cauca-land, To hear my herdsmen's horn; And to watch the waggons and brown brood mares, And the tents where I was born!”
Picard had never read Kingsley's stirring verses. ”This old chap's very drunk!” he thought; but having his own reasons for wis.h.i.+ng to stand well with Miss Hallaton's father, he ”hardened him on,” as he would have called it, without remorse. ”I don't think _you_ can complain, Sir Henry,” said he. ”You've had the best of everything all your time, and can give pounds of weight to most of the young ones still. You might marry any woman in London to-morrow if you liked. I wonder you don't.”
Sir Henry looked pleased.
”Marry!” he repeated. ”Marry! I'm not sure that I wouldn't, only, between you and me, my dear fellow, women in general are a very inferior lot. They're delightful, I grant you, wholesale; but when you come to the retail business, as the tradesmen say, there's great risk and very little profit about the article. They don't wear well when you buy, and if you want to sell, there's no market that I know of nearer than Constantinople. I fancy the Turks understand the business; but I am _not_ a Turk. Heaven forbid! Fancy a plurality of wives!”
”I'm not sure I should mind it!” laughed Picard--”with the Bosphorus at one's door, of course.”
”The Bosphorus wouldn't help you,” said Sir Henry. ”She'd come up again if she wanted, you may depend, though you sank her forty fathom deep, with a round-shot tied to her ankles. No; I think I understand the s.e.x thoroughly. In my own experience, I've found them perverse, wilful, obstinate.”
”Unselfish, at least,” put in Picard.
”Unselfis.h.!.+” exclaimed the other. ”Not a bit of it! They're twice as selfish as we are, and that's saying a good deal. A tyrant, indeed, keeps them down, and so long as he remains perfectly unfeeling, the thing works moderately well. But if they can get what you and I call a good fellow to marry them, why he leads the life of a galley slave!
There was my poor brother Ralph--I do believe, sir, he died of it--married a pig-headed idiot without two ideas, and she traded on his kind heart till she wore it clean away. I argued the point with her once. Fancy _arguing_ with a woman, and an ignorant one! 'What should _you_ say,' I asked, 'if Ralph took you out partridge-shooting, we'll suppose, and kept you for hours standing in wet turnips to load for him, or carry a spare gun? Yet you have no scruple in making him accompany you to parties, which he hates far more than you would the wet turnips, and are not ashamed to speak very unkindly to him even if he _looks_ bored.' 'That's nothing to do with it,' she answered.--Such is a woman's logic.--'I dare say _you_ wouldn't stand it; but then you've more character than Ralph!' She's married a stock-jobber since. I'm happy to say he bullies her like the devil, yet I do believe she likes him twice as well as Ralph.”
”But _you_ took warning, I hope, Sir Henry,” said Picard, laughing in his sleeve.
”They never tried that sort of thing with _me_,” answered the baronet.
”Still, there's no certainty about the thing, and I fancy it's better to let it alone. Besides, one's ideas vary about women in a regular procession of decades. Up to ten, we're dependent on them; from ten to twenty, we despise them; from twenty to thirty, we adore them; from thirty to forty, we believe in them; from forty to fifty, we mistrust them; from fifty to sixty, we avoid them; from sixty to seventy, we tolerate them; and if we live any longer after that, why we become dependent on them again.”
Picard burst out laughing.
”A moral lesson!” he exclaimed, ”and from one who has not neglected practice in theory. Here we are at your own door, Sir Henry. I shall not forget your maxims. Good night.”
The other feeling for his latch-key, looked up where the blinds were drawn over the windows of Helen's bed-chamber.
”There are exceptions,” said he musingly, ”and one good one is worth all the others put together; and yet nine-tenths of our annoyances, and all our sorrows, can generally be traced to a woman.”
Picard sighed as he turned away. Men may rail as they will, but each has a secret image of his own that he esteems a pearl of exceptional price, an angel far above the common short-comings of humanity. Like the negro with his fetish, he takes it out sometimes to blame and scold, no less than plead with and adore, but he always puts it back reverently in its place, to nestle in the warmest and most sacred corner of his heart.
CHAPTER XIX.
A DRAWN BATTLE.
Mrs. Lascelles, retiring for the night, or rather morning, on her return from the Opera, found herself beset with troubles and perplexities of unusual gravity. Taking off her ornaments, and laying them one by one on the dressing-table, she reflected sadly on the relative positions of her two greatest friends, Jin Ross and Helen Hallaton. The longer she looked at the complication the less she liked it. For a woman to entertain two lovers, as a game-keeper hunts a brace of pointers, she considered natural enough. They should be made to range in different directions at her bidding, back each other without hesitation on her behalf, and, above all, come meekly to heel at the shortest notice when desired. This seemed only the normal condition of humanity, and, in her own case, she had hitherto found such amicable arrangements answer remarkably well.
Sir Henry, indeed, proved wilder than any she had hitherto endeavoured to train; but Goldthred, again, if not the most sagacious, was by far the meekest and most docile she had ever taken in hand. For a moment, she laid down her brushes, smiled at her own comely face in the gla.s.s, and by some unaccountable a.s.sociation of ideas, found herself wis.h.i.+ng this last admirer would show a little more self-a.s.sertion, more enterprise, altogether borrow a leaf or two out of the black books studied over-diligently by the former.
Then she reproached herself for giving a thought to her own concerns, while Helen Hallaton looked so pale and sad, resuming the thread of her regrets with the use of her hair-brushes, and cheris.h.i.+ng a certain impulse of womanly indignation at the idea of two young ladies being in love with one man.
The proverb affirming that ”What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” cannot a.s.suredly be of feminine invention. The code of our fair aggressors seems framed by a justice whose scales are not duly registered, and whose bandage does not entirely cover both eyes. ”If I kill _you_,” seems the ladies' verdict, ”justifiable homicide, and it serves you right! But if you kill _me_, it's premeditated woman-slaughter, and penal servitude for life!”
How many of us are thus transported, without really deserving it, I refrain from speculating; but I am informed by convicts themselves that good conduct is powerless to obtain any remission of sentence, and that there is no such thing as a ticket-of-leave.
Before Mrs. Lascelles got into bed, she resolved to make a touching appeal to Jin's generosity directly after breakfast, and if need were, to back it with all the force of her own authority and moral influence.
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