Sir Brook Fossbrooke Volume I Part 34

"Certainly not. It is a liberty I should not dare to take."

"Well, darling," said she, with a saucy laugh, "he is more fortunate in having _you_ for a granddaughter than me. I 'm afraid I should have less discretion,--at all events, less dread."

"Don't be so sure of that," said Lucy, quietly. "Grandpapa is no common person. It is not his temper but his talent that one is loath to encounter."

"I do not suspect that either would terrify me greatly. As the soldiers say, Lucy, I have been under fire pretty often, and I don't mind it now.

Do you know, child, that we have got into a most irritable tone with each other? Each of us is saying something that provokes a sharp reply, and we are actually sparring without knowing it."

"I certainly did not know it," said Lucy, taking her hand within both her own, "and I ask pardon if I have said anything to hurt you."

Leaving her hand to Lucy unconsciously, and not heeding one word of what she had said, Mrs. Sewell sat with her eyes fixed on the floor deep in thought. "I 'm sure, Lucy," said she at last, "I don't know why I asked you all those questions awhile ago. That man--Sir Brook, I mean--is nothing to me; he ought to be, but he is not. My father and he were friends; that is, my father thought he was his friend, and left him the guardianship of me on his deathbed."

"Your guardian,--Sir Brook your guardian?" cried Lucy, with intense eagerness.

"Yes; with more power than the law, I believe, would accord to any guardian." She paused and seemed lost in thought for some seconds, and then went on: "Colonel Sewell and he never liked each other. Sir Brook took little trouble to be liked by him; perhaps Dudley was as careless on his side. What a tiresome vein I have got in! How should _you_ care for all this?"

"But I do care--I care for all that concerns you."

"I take it, if you were to hear Sir Brook's account, we should not make a more brilliant figure than himself. He 'd tell you about our mode of life, and high play, and the rest of it; but, child, every one plays high in India, every one does scores of things there they would n't do at home, partly because the _ennui_ of life tempts to anything,--anything that would relieve it; and then all are tolerant because all are equally--I was going to say wicked; but I don't mean wickedness,--I mean bored to that degree that there is no stimulant left without a breach of the decalogue."

"I think that might be called wickedness," said Lucy, dryly.

"Call it what you like, only take my word for it you 'd do the selfsame things if you lived there. I was pretty much what you are now when I left England; and if any naughty creature like myself were to talk, as I am doing to you now, and make confession of all her misdeeds and misfortunes, I'm certain I'd have known how to bridle up and draw away my hand, and retire to a far end of the sofa, and look unutterable pruderies, just as you do this moment."

"Without ever suspecting it, certainly," said Lucy laughing.

"Tear up that odious drawing, dear Lucy," said she, rising and walking the room with impatience. "Tear it up; or, if you won't do that, let me write a line under it--one line, I ask for no more--so that people may know at whom they are looking."

"I will do neither; nor will I sit here to listen to one word against him."

"Which means, child, that your knowledge of life is so-much greater than mine, you can trust implicitly to your own judgment. I can admire your courage, certainly, though I am not captivated by your prudence."

"It is because I have so little faith in my own judgment that I am unwilling to lose the friend who can guide me."

"Perhaps it would be unsafe if I were to ask you to choose between _him_ and me," said Mrs. Sewell, very slowly, and with her eyes fully bent on Lucy.

"I hope you will not."

"With such a warning I certainly shall not do so. Who-could have believed it was so late?" said she, hastily looking at her watch; "What a seductive creature you must be, child, to slip over one's whole morning without knowing it,--two o'clock already. You lunch about this time?"

"Yes, punctually at two."

"Are you sufficiently lady of the house to invite me, Lucy?"

"I am sure _you_ need no invitation here; you are one of us."

"What a little Jesuit it is!" said Mrs. Sewell, patting her cheek.

"Come, child, I 'll be equal with you. I 'll enter the room on your arm, and say, 'Sir William, your granddaughter insisted on my remaining; I thought it an awkwardness, but she tells me she is the mistress here, and I obey.'"

"And you will find he will be too well-bred to contradict you," said Lucy, while a deep blush covered her face and throat.

"Oh, I think him positively charming!" said Mrs. Sewell, as she arranged her hair before the gla.s.s; "I think him charming. My mother-in-law and I have a dozen pitched battles every day on the score of his temper and his character. _My_ theory is, the only intolerable thing on earth is a fool; and whether it be that Lady Lendrick suspects me of any secret intention to designate one still nearer to her by this reservation, I do not know, but the declaration drives her half crazy. Come, Lucy, we shall be keeping grandpapa waiting for us."

They moved down the stairs arm-in-arm, without a word; but as they gained the door of the dining-room, Mrs. Sewell turned fully round and said, in a low deep voice, "Marry anything,--rake, gambler, villain,--anything, the basest and the blackest; but never take a fool, for a fool means them all combined."

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE NEST WITH STRANGE "BIRDS" IN IT

To the Swan's Nest, very differently tenanted from what we saw it at the opening of our story, we have now to conduct our reader. Its present occupant--"the acquisition to any neighborhood," as the house-agent styled him--was Colonel Sewell.

Lady Lendrick had taken the place for her son on finding that Sir William would not extend his hospitality to him. She had taken the precaution not merely to pay a year's rent in advance, but to make a number of changes in the house and its dependencies, which she hoped might render the residence more palatable to him, and reconcile him in some degree to its isolation and retirement.

The Colonel was, however, one of those men--they are numerous enough in this world--who canva.s.s the mouth of the gift-horse, and have few scruples in detecting the signs of his age. He criticised the whole place with a most commendable frankness. It was a "pokey little hole."

It was dark; it was low-ceilinged. It was full of inconveniences.

The furniture was old-fashioned. You had to mount two steps into the drawing-room and go down three into the dining-room. He had to cross a corridor to his bath-room, and there was a great Tudor window in the small breakfast-parlor, that made one feel as if sitting in a lantern.

As for the stables, "he would n't put a donkey into them." No light, no ventilation,--no anything, in short. To live surrounded with so many inconveniences was the most complete a.s.sertion of his fallen condition, and, as he said, "he had never realized his fall in the world till he settled down in that miserable Nest."

There are men whose especial delight it is to call your attention to their impaired condition, their threadbare coat, their patched shoes, their shabby equipage, or their sorry dwelling, as though they were framing a sort of indictment against Fate, and setting forth the hardships of persons of merit like them being subjected to this unjustifiable treatment by Fortune.

"I suppose you never thought to see me reduced to this," is the burden of their song; and it is very strange how, by mere repet.i.tion and insistence, these people establish for themselves a sort of position, and oblige the world to yield them a black-mail of respect and condolence.

"This was not the sort of tipple I used to set before you once on a time, old fellow," will be uttered by one of whose hospitalities you have never partaken. "It was another guess sort of beast I gave you for a mount when we met last," will be said by a man who never rose above a cob pony; and one is obliged to yield a kind of polite a.s.sent to such balderdash, or stand forward as a public prosecutor and arraign the rascal for a humbug.

In this self-commiseration Sewell was a master, and there was not a corner of the house he did not make the b.u.t.t of his ridicule,--to contrast its littleness and vulgarity with the former ways and belongings of his own once splendor.

"You're capital fellows," said he to a party of officers from the neighboring garrison, "to come and see me in this dog-hole. Try and find a chair you can sit on, and I 'll ask my wife if we can give you some dinner. You remember me up at Rangoon, Hobbes? Another guess sort of place, wasn't it? I had the Rajah's palace and four elephants at my orders. At Guzerat, too, I was the Resident, and, by Jove, I never dreamed of coming down to this!"

Too indolent or too indifferent to care where or how she was lodged, his wife gave no heed to his complaints, beyond a little half-supercilious smile as he uttered them. "If a fellow will marry, however, he deserves it all," was his usual wind-up to all his lamentations; and in this he seemed to console himself by the double opportunity of pitying himself and insulting his wife.

All that Colonel Cave and his officers could say in praise of the spot, its beauty, its neatness, and its comfort, were only fresh aliment to his depreciation, and he more than half implied that possibly the place was quite good enough for _them_, but that was not exactly the question at issue.

Some men go through life permitted to say scores of things for which their neighbor would be irrevocably cut and excluded from society.

Either that the world is amused at their bitterness, or that it is regarded as a malady, far worse to him who bears than to him who witnesses it,--whatever the reason,--people endure these men, and make even a sort of vicious pets of them. Sewell was of this order, and a fine specimen too.

All the men around him were his equals in every respect, and yet there was not one of them who did not accept a position of quiet, unresisting inferiority to him for the sake of his bad temper and his bad tongue. It was "his way," they said, and they bore it.

He was a consummate adept in all the details of a household; and his dinners were perfection, his wine good, and his servants drilled to the very acme of discipline. These were not mean accessories to any pretension; and as they sat over their claret, a pleasanter and more social tone succeeded than the complaining spirit of their host had at first promised.

The talk was chiefly professional. Pipeclay will ever a.s.sert its pre-eminence, and with reason, for it is a grand leveller; and Digges, who joined three months ago, may have the Army List as well by heart as the oldest major in the service: and so they discussed, Where was Hobson? what made Jobson sell out? how did Bobson get out of that sc.r.a.pe with the paymaster? and how long will Dobson be able to live at his present rate in that light-cavalry corps? Everything that fell from them showed the most thorough intimacy with the condition, the fortune, and the prospects of the men they discussed,--familiarity there was enough of, but no friendship. No one seemed to trouble himself whether the sick-leave or the sell-out meant hopeless calamity,--all were dashed with a species of well-bred fatalism that was astonished with nothing, rejoiced at nothing, repined at nothing.

"I wish Trafford would make up his mind!" cried one. "Three weeks ago he told me positively he would leave, and now I hear he offered Craycroft three thousand pounds to retire from the majority."

"That 's true; Craycroft told me so himself; but old Joe is a wily bird, and he 'll not be taken so easily."

"He's an eldest son now!" broke in another. "What does he care whether he be called major or captain?"