A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus Part 23

'Thank you, sir. We have a dissertation then upon dress and fashion, another upon engaging domestics, another about daily duties, another about visiting, another about fresh air and exercise--'

'The most essential of any,' cried Frank, jumping up, and pulling his wife by the arms out of her low wicker-chair. 'There is just time for nine holes at golf before it is dark, if you wilt come exactly as you are. But listen to this, young lady. If ever again I see you fretting or troubling yourself about your household affairs--'

'No, no, Frank, I won't!'

'Well, if you do, Mrs. Beeton goes into the kitchen-fire. Now remember?'

'You are sure you don't envy Mr. Beeton?'

'I don't envy a man upon earth.'

'Then why should I try to be Mrs. Beeton?'

'Why indeed?'

'O Frank, what a load off my mind! Those sixteen hundred pages have just lain upon it for months. Dear old boy! come on!'

And they clattered downstairs for their golf-clubs.

CHAPTER XII--MR. SAMUEL PEPYS

There were few things which Maude liked so much as a long winter evening when Frank and she dined together, and then sat beside the fire and made good cheer. It would be an exaggeration to say that she preferred it to a dance, but next to that supreme joy, and higher even than the theatre in her scale of pleasures, were those serene and intimate evenings when they talked at their will, and were silent at their will, within their home brightened by those little jokes and endearments and allusions which make up that inner domestic masonry which is close-tiled for ever to the outsider. Five or six evenings a week, she with her sewing and Frank with his book, settled down to such enjoyment as men go to the ends of the earth to seek, while it awaits them, if they will but atune their souls to sympathy, beside their own hearthstones. Now and again their sweet calm would be broken by a ring at the bell, when some friend of Frank's would come round to pay them an evening visit. At the sound Maude would say 'bother,' and Frank something shorter and stronger, but, as the intruder appeared, they would both break into, 'Well, really now it WAS good of you to drop in upon us in this homely way.' Without such hypocrisy, the world would be a hard place to live in.

I may have mentioned somewhere that Frank had a catholic taste in literature. Upon a shelf in their bedroom--a relic of his bachelor days--there stood a small line of his intimate books, the books which filled all the c.h.i.n.ks of his life when no new books were forthcoming.

They were all volumes which he had read in his youth, and many times since, until they had become the very tie-beams of his mind. His tastes were healthy and obvious without being fine. Macaulay's Essays, Holmes' Autocrat, Gibbons' History, Jefferies' Story of my Heart, Carlyle's Life, Pepys' Diary, and Borrow's Lavengro were among his inner circle of literary friends. The st.u.r.dy East Anglian, half prize-fighter, half missionary, was a particular favourite of his, and so was the garrulous Secretary of the Navy. One day it struck him that it would be a pleasant thing to induce his wife to share his enthusiasms, and he suggested that the evenings should be spent in reading selections from these old friends of his. Maude was delighted. If he had proposed to read the rig-vedas in the original Sanskrit, Maude would have listened with a smiling face. It is in such trifles that a woman's love is more than a man's.

That night Frank came downstairs with a thick well-thumbed volume in his hand.

'This is Mr. Pepys,' said he solemnly.

'What a funny name!' cried Maude. 'It makes me think of indigestion.

Why? Oh yes, pepsine, of course.'

'We shall take a dose of him every night after dinner to complete the resemblance. But seriously, dear, I think that now that we have taken up a course of reading, we should try to approach it in a grave spirit, and endeavour to realise--Oh, I say, don't!'

'I AM so sorry, dear! I do hope I didn't hurt, you!'

'You did--considerably.'

'It all came from my having the needle in my hand at the time--and you looked so solemn--and--well, I couldn't help it.'

'Little wretch--!'

'No, dear; Jemima may come in any moment with the coffee. Now, do sit down and read about Mr Pepys to me. And first of all, would you mind explaining all about the gentleman, from the beginning, and taking nothing for granted, just as if I had never heard of him before.'

'I don't believe--'

'Never mind, sir! Be a good boy and do exactly what you are told.

Now begin!'

'Well, Maude, Mr. Pepys was born--'

'What was his first name?'

'Samuel.'

'Oh dear, I'm sure I should not have liked him.'

'Well, it's too late to change that. He was born--I could see by looking, but it really doesn't matter, does it? He was born somewhere in sixteen hundred and something or other, and I forget what his father was.'

'I must try to remember what you tell me.'

'Well, it all amounts to this, that he got on very well in the world, that he became at last a high official of the navy in the time of Charles the Second, and that he died in fairly good circ.u.mstances, and left his library, which was a fine one, to one of the universities, I can't remember which.'

'There is an accuracy about your information, Frank--'

'I know, dear, but it really does not matter. All this has nothing to do with the main question.'

'Go on, then!'

'Well, this library was left as a kind of dust-catcher, as such libraries are, until one day, more than a hundred years after the old boy's death, some enterprising person seems to have examined his books, and he found a number of volumes of writing which were all in cipher, so that no one could make head or tail of them.'

'Dear me, how very interesting!'

'Yes, it naturally excited curiosity. Why should a man write volumes of cipher? Imagine the labour of it! So some one set to work to solve the cipher. This was about the year 1820. After three years they succeeded.'

'How in the world did they do it?'

'Well, they say that human ingenuity never yet invented a cipher which human ingenuity could not also solve. Anyhow, they did succeed. And when they had done so, and copied it all out clean, they found they had got hold of such a book as was never heard of before in the whole history of literature.'

Maude laid her sewing on her lap, and looked across with her lips parted and her eyebrows raised.

'They found that it was an inner Diary of the life of this man, with all his impressions, and all his doings, and all his thoughts--not his ought-to-be thoughts, but his real, real thoughts, just as he thought then at the back of his soul. You see this man, and you know him very much better than his own wife knew him. It is not only that he tells of his daily doings, and gives us such an intimate picture of life in those days, as could by no other means have been conveyed, but it is as a piece of psychology that the thing is so valuable.

Remember the dignity of the man, a high government official, an orator, a writer, a patron of learning, and here you have the other side, the little thoughts, the mean ideas which may lurk under a bewigged head, and behind a solemn countenance. Not that he is worse than any of us. Not a bit. But he is frank. And that is why the book is really a consoling one, for every sinner who reads it can say to himself, "Well, if this man who did so well, and was so esteemed, felt like this, it is no very great wonder that I do."'

Maude looked at the fat brown book with curiosity. 'Is it really all there?' she asked.

'No, dear, it will never all be published. A good deal of it is, I believe, quite impossible. And when he came to the impossible places, he doubled and trebled his cipher, so as to make sure that it should never be made out. But all that is usually published is here.' Frank turned over the leaves, which were marked here and there with pencilings.

'Why are you smiling, Frank?'

'Only at his way of referring to his wife.'

'Oh, he was married?'