Part 38 (1/2)
”Jim, my boy,” I answered, ”I love you like a brother. What is it?”
”I have no secrets from you, Jeff,” he said; ”so I don't mind telling you.” Another hesitation! I grew rather anxious. ”What the deuce is coming?” I thought. ”What can she have been up to? Go on, old fellow,”
I added aloud; ”let's hear all about it.”
He stood at the end of the room, looking rather sheepish. ”Why, the fact is, old fellow, that I begin to suspect that I have outlived any little attachment I had in that quarter. I've been staying in the house two months with her, you see; and, in fact!--in fact!”--here he brought up short again.
”James Stockbridge,” I said, sitting up in bed, ”you atrocious humbug; two months ago you informed me, with a sigh like a groggy pair of bellows, that her image could only be effaced from your heart by death.
You have seduced me, whose only fault was loving you too well to part with you, into coming sixteen thousand miles to a barbarous land, far from kindred and country, on the plea that your blighted affections made England less endurable than--France, I'll say for argument;--and, now having had two months' opportunity of studying the character of the beloved one, you coolly inform me that the whole thing was a mistake. I repeat that you are a humbug.”
”If you don't hold your tongue, and that quick,” he replied, ”I'll send this boot at your ugly head. Now, then!”
I ducked, fully expecting it was coming, and laughed silently under the bed-clothes. I was very happy to hear this--I was very happy to hear that a man, whom I really liked so well, had got the better of a pa.s.sion for a woman who I knew was utterly incapable of being to him what his romantic high-flown notions required a wife to be. ”If this happy result,” I said to myself, ”can be rendered the more sure by ridicule, that shall not be wanting. Meanwhile, I will sue for peace, and see how it came about.”
I rose again and saw he had got his other boot half off, and was watching for me. ”Jim,” said I, ”you ain't angry because I laughed at you, are you?”
”Angry!” he answered. ”I am never angry with you, and you know it. I've been a fool, and I ought to be laughed at.”
”Pooh!” said I, ”no more a fool than other men have been before you, from father Adam downwards.”
”And he was a most con--”
”There,” I interrupted: ”don't abuse your ancestors. Tell me why you have changed your mind so quick?”
”That's a precious hard thing to do, mind you;” he answered. ”A thousand trifling circ.u.mstances, which taken apart are as worthless straws, when they are bound up together become a respectable truss, which is marketable, and ponderable. So it is with little traits in Mary's character, which I have only noticed lately, nothing separately, yet when taken together, to say the least, different to what I had imagined while my eyes were blinded. To take one instance among fifty; there's her cousin Tom, one of the finest fellows that ever stepped; but still I don't like to see her, a married woman, allowing him to pull her hair about, and twist flowers in it.”
This was very true, but I thought that if James instead of Tom had been allowed the privilege of decorating her hair, he might have looked on it with different eyes. James, I saw, cared too little about her to be very jealous, and so I saw that there was no fear of any coolness between him and Troubridge, which was a thing to be rejoiced at, as it would have been a terrible blow on our little society, and which I feared at one time that evening would have been the case.
”Jim,” said I, ”I have got something to tell you. Do you know, I believe there is some mystery about Doctor Mulhaus.”
”He is a walking mystery,” said Jim; ”but he is a n.o.ble good fellow, though unhappily a frog-eater.”
”Ah! but I believe Miss Thornton knows it.”
”Very like,” said Jim, yawning.
”I told him all the conversation I overheard that evening.”
”Are you sure she said 'the king'?” he asked.
”Quite sure,” I said; ”now, what do you make of it?”
”I make this of it,” he said: ”that it is no earthly business of ours, or we should have been informed of it; and if I were you, I wouldn't breathe a word of it to any mortal soul, or let the Doctor suspect that you overheard anything. Secrets where kings are concerned are precious sacred things, old Jeff. Good night!”
Chapter XXII
SAM BUCKLEY'S EDUCATION.
This narrative which I am now writing is neither more nor less than an account of what befell certain of my acquaintances during a period extending over nearly, or quite, twenty years, interspersed, and let us hope embellished, with descriptions of the country in which these circ.u.mstances took place, and ill.u.s.trated by conversations well known to me by frequent repet.i.tion, selected as throwing light upon the characters of the persons concerned. Episodes there are, too, which I have thought it worth while to introduce as being more or less interesting, as bearing on the manners of a country but little known, out of which materials it is difficult to select those most proper to make my tale coherent; yet such has been my object, neither to dwell on the one hand unnecessarily on the more unimportant pa.s.sages, nor on the other hand to omit anything which may be supposed to bear on the general course of events.