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CHAPTER II.
OUR DILEMMA.
WHO is the young lady? And how did she find her way into The Glen
Tower?
Her name (in relation to which I shall have something more to say
a little further on) is Jessie Yelverton. She is an orphan and an
only child. Her mother died while she was an infant; her father
was my dear and valued friend, Major Yelverton. He lived long
enough to celebrate his darling's seventh birthday. When he died
he intrusted his authority over her and his responsibility toward
her to his brother and to me.
When I was summoned to the reading of the major's will, I knew
perfectly well that I should hear myself appointed guardian and
executor with his brother; and I had been also made acquainted
with my lost friend's wishes as to his daughter's education, and
with his intentions as to the disposal of all his property in her
favor. My own idea, therefore, was, that the reading of the will
would inform me of nothing which I had not known in the
testator's lifetime. When the day came for hearing it, however, I
found that I had been over hasty in arriving at this conclusion.
Toward the end of the document there was a clause inserted which
took me entirely by surprise.
After providing for the education of Miss Yelverton under the
direction of her guardians, and for her residence, under ordinary
circumstances, with the major's sister, Lady Westwick, the clause
concluded by saddling the child's future inheritance with this
curious condition:
From the period of her leaving school to the period of her
reaching the age of twenty-one years, Miss Yelverton was to pass
not less than six consecutive weeks out of every year under the
roof of one of her two guardians. During the lives of both of
them, it was left to her own choice to say which of the two she
would prefer to live with. In all other respects the condition
was imperative. If she forfeited it, excepting, of course, the
case of the deaths of both her guardians, she was only to have a
life-interest in the property; if she obeyed it, the money itself
was to become her own possession on the day when she completed
her twenty-first year.
This clause in the will, as I have said, took me at first by
surprise. I remembered how devotedly Lady Westwick had soothed
her sister-in-law's death-bed sufferings, and how tenderly she
had afterward watched over the welfare of the little motherless
child--I remembered the innumerable claims she had established in
this way on her brother's confidence in her affection for his
orphan daughter, and I was, therefore, naturally amazed at the
appearance of a condition in his will which seemed to show a
positive distrust of Lady Westwick's undivided influence over the
character and conduct of her niece.
A few words from my fellow-guardian, Mr. Richard Yelverton, and a
little after-consideration of some of my deceased friend's
peculiarities of disposition and feeling, to which I had not
hitherto attached sufficient importance, were enough to make me
understand the motives by which he had been influenced in
providing for the future of his child.
Major Yelverton had raised himself to a position of affluence and
eminence from a very humble origin. He was the son of a small
farmer, and it was his pride never to forget this circumstance,
never to be ashamed of it, and never to allow the prejudices of
society to influence his own settled opinions on social questions
in general.
Acting, in all that related to his intercourse with the world, on
such principles as these, the major, it is hardly necessary to
say, held some strangely heterodox opinions on the modern
education of girls, and on the evil influence of society over the
characters of women in general. Out of the strength of those
opinions, and out of the certainty of his conviction that his
sister did not share them, had grown that condition in his will
which removed his daughter from the influence of her aunt for six
consec utive weeks in every year. Lady Westwick was the most
light-hearted, the most generous, the most impulsive of women;
capable, when any serious occasion called it forth, of all that
was devoted and self-sacrificing, but, at other and ordinary
times, constitutionally restless, frivolous, and eager for
perpetual gayety. Distrusting the sort of life which he knew his
daughter would lead under her aunt's roof, and at the same time
gratefully remembering his sister's affectionate devotion toward
his dying wife and her helpless infant, Major Yelverton had
attempted to make a compromise, which, while it allowed Lady
Westwick the close domestic intercourse with her niece that she
had earned by innumerable kind offices, should, at the same time,
place the young girl for a fixed period of every year of her
minority under the corrective care of two such quiet
old-fashioned guardians as his brother and myself. Such is the
history of the clause in the will. My friend little thought, when
he dictated it, of the extraordinary result to which it was one
day to lead.
For some years, however, events ran on smoothly enough. Little
Jessie was sent to an excellent school, with strict instructions
to the mistress to make a good girl of her, and not a fashionable
young lady. Although she was reported to be anything but a
pattern pupil in respect of attention to her lessons, she became
from the first the chosen favorite of every one about her. The
very offenses which she committed against the discipline of the
school were of the sort which provoke a smile even on the stern
countenance of authority itself. One of these quaint freaks of
mischief may not inappropriately be mentioned here, inasmuch as
it gained her the pretty nickname under which she will be found
to appear occasionally in these pages.
On a certain autumn night shortly after the Midsummer vacation,
the mistress of the school fancied she saw a light under the door
of the bedroom occupied by Jessie and three other girls. It was
then close on midnight; and, fearing that some case of sudden
illness might have happened, she hastened into the room. On
opening the door, she discovered, to her horror and amazement,
that all four girls were out of bed--were dressed in
brilliantly-fantastic costumes, representing the four grotesque
"Queens" of Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs, familiar to us
all on the pack of cards--and were dancing a quadrille, in which
Jessie sustained the character of The Queen of Hearts. The next
morning's investigation disclosed that Miss Yelverton had
smuggled the dresses into the school, and had amused herself by
giving an impromptu fancy ball to her companions, in imitation of
an entertainment of the same kind at which she had figured in a
"court-card" quadrille at her aunt's country house.
The dresses were instantly confiscated and the necessary
punishment promptly administered; but the remembrance of Jessie's
extraordinary outrage on bedroom discipline lasted long enough to
become one of the traditions of the school, and she and her
sister-culprits were thenceforth hailed as the "queens" of the
four "suites" by their class-companions whenever the mistress's
back was turned, Whatever might have become of the nicknames thus
employed in relation to the other three girls, such a mock title
as The Queen of Hearts was too appropriately descriptive of the
natural charm of Jessie's character, as well as of the adventure
in which she had taken the lead, not to rise naturally to the
lips of every one who knew her. It followed her to her aunt's
house--it came to be as habitually and familiarly connected with
her, among her friends of all ages, as if it had been formally
inscribed on her baptismal register; and it has stolen its way
into these pages because it falls from my pen naturally and
inevitably, exactly as it often falls from my lips in real life.
When Jessie left school the first difficulty presented itself--in
other words, the necessity arose of fulfilling the conditions of
the will. At that time I was already settled at The Glen Tower,
and her living six weeks in our dismal solitude and our humdrum
society was, as she herself frankly wrote me word, quite out of
the question. Fortunately, she had always got on well with her
uncle and his family; so she exerted her liberty of choice, and,
much to her own relief and to mine also, passed her regular six
weeks of probation, year after year, under Mr. Richard
Yelverton's roof.
During this period I heard of her regularly, sometimes from my
fellow-guardian, sometimes from my son George, who, whenever his
military duties allowed him the opportunity, contrived to see
her, now at her aunt's house, and now at Mr. Yelverton's. The
particulars of her character and conduct, which I gleaned in this
way, more than sufficed to convince me that the poor major's plan
for the careful training of his daughter's disposition, though
plausible enough in theory, was little better than a total
failure in practice. Miss Jessie, to use the expressive common
phrase, took after her aunt. She was as generous, as impulsive,
as light-hearted, as fond of change, and gayety, and fine
clothes--in short, as complete and genuine a woman as Lady
Westwick herself. It was impossible to reform the "Queen of
Hearts," and equally impossible not to love her. Such, in few
words, was my fellow-guardian's report of his experience of our
handsome young ward.
So the time passed till the year came of which I am now
writing--the ever-memorable year, to England, of the Russian war.
It happened that I had heard less than usual at this period, and
indeed for many months before it, of Jessie and her proceedings.
My son had been ordered out with his regiment to the Crimea in
1854, and had other work in hand now than recording the sayings
and doings of a young lady. Mr. Richard Yelverton, who had been
hitherto used to write to me with tolerable regularity, seemed
now, for some reason that I could not conjecture, to have
forgotten my existence. Ultimately I was reminded of my ward by
one of George's own letters, in which he asked for news of her;
and I wrote at once to Mr. Yelverton. The answer that reached me
was written by his wife: he was dangerously ill. The next letter
that came informed me of his death. This happened early in the
spring of the year 1855.
I am ashamed to confess it, but the change in my own position was
the first idea that crossed my mind when I read the news of Mr.
Yelverton's death. I was now left sole guardian, and Jessie
Yelverton wanted a year still of coming of age.
By the next day's post I wrote to her about the altered state of
the relations between us. She was then on the Continent with her
aunt, having gone abroad at the very beginning of the year.
Consequently, so far as eighteen hundred and fifty-five was
concerned, the condition exacted by the will yet remained to be
performed. She had still six weeks to pass--her last six weeks,
seeing that she was now twenty years old--under the roof of one
of her guardians, and I was now the only guardian left.
In due course of time I received my answer, written on
rose-colored paper, and expressed throughout in a tone of light,
easy, feminine banter, which amused me in spite of myself. Miss
Jessie, according to her own account, was hesitating, on receipt
of my letter, between two alternatives--the one, of allowing
herself to be buried six weeks in The Glen Tower; the other, of
breaking the condition, giving up the money, and remaining
magnanimously contented with nothing but a life-interest in her
father's property. At present she inclined decidedly toward
giving up the money and escaping the clutches of "the three
horrid old men;" but she would let me know again if she happened
to change her mind. And so, with best love, she would beg to
remain always affectionately mine, as long as she was well out of
my reach.
The summer passed, the autumn came, and I never heard from her
again. Under ordinary circumstances, this long silence might have
made me feel a little uneasy. But news reached me about this time
from the Crimea that my son was wounded--not dangerously, thank
God, but still severely enough to be la id up--and all my
anxieties were now centered in that direction. By the beginning
of September, however, I got better accounts of him, and my mind
was made easy enough to let me think of Jessie again. Just as I
was considering the necessity of writing once more to my
refractory ward, a second letter arrived from her. She had
returned at last from abroad, had suddenly changed her mind,
suddenly grown sick of society, suddenly become enamored of the
pleasures of retirement, and suddenly found out that the three
horrid old men were three dear old men, and that six weeks'
solitude at The Glen Tower was the luxury, of all others, that
she languished for most. As a necessary result of this altered
state of things, she would therefore now propose to spend her
allotted six weeks with her guardian. We might certainly expect
her on the twentieth of September, and she would take the
greatest care to fit herself for our society by arriving in the
lowest possible spirits, and bringing her own sackcloth and ashes
along with her.
The first ordeal to which this alarming letter forced me to
submit was the breaking of the news it contained to my two
brothers. The disclosure affected them very differently. Poor
dear Owen merely turned pale, lifted his weak, thin hands in a
panic-stricken manner, and then sat staring at me in speechless
and motionless bewilderment. Morgan stood up straight before me,
plunged both his hands into his pockets, burst suddenly into the
harshest laugh I ever heard from his lips, and told me, with an
air of triumph, that it was exactly what he expected.
"What you expected?" I repeated, in astonishment.
"Yes," returned Morgan, with his bitterest emphasis. "It doesn't
surprise me in the least. It's the way things go in this
world--it's the regular moral see-saw of good and evil--the old
story with the old end to it. They were too happy in the garden
of Eden--down comes the serpent and turns them out. Solomon was
too wise--down comes the Queen of Sheba, and makes a fool of him.
We've been too comfortable at The Glen Tower--down comes a woman,
and sets us all three by the ears together. All I wonder at is
that it hasn't happened before." With those words Morgan
resignedly took out his pipe, put on his old felt hat and turned
to the door.
"You're not going away before she comes?" exclaimed Owen,
piteously. "Don't leave us--please don't leave us!"
"Going!" cried Morgan, with great contempt. "What should I gain
by that? When destiny has found a man out, and heated his
gridiron for him, he has nothing left to do, that I know of, but
to get up and sit on it."
I opened my lips to protest against the implied comparison
between a young lady and a hot gridiron, but, before I could
speak, Morgan was gone.
"Well," I said to Owen, "we must make the best of it. We must
brush up our manners, and set the house tidy, and amuse her as
well as we can. The difficulty is where to put her; and, when
that is settled, the next puzzle will be, what to order in to
make her comfortable. It's a hard thing, brother, to say what
will or what will not please a young lady's taste."
Owen looked absently at me, in greater bewilderment than
ever--opened his eyes in perplexed consideration--repeated to
himself slowly the word "tastes"--and then helped me with this
suggestion:
"Hadn't we better begin, Griffith, by getting her a plum-cake?"
"My dear Owen," I remonstrated, "it is a grown young woman who is
coming to see us, not a little girl from school."
"Oh!" said Owen, more confused than before. "Yes--I see; we
couldn't do wrong, I suppose--could we?--if we got her a little
dog, and a lot of new gowns."
There was, evidently, no more help in the way of advice to be
expected from Owen than from Morgan himself. As I came to that
conclusion, I saw through the window our old housekeeper on her
way, with her basket, to the kitchen-garden, and left the room to
ascertain if she could assist us.
To my great dismay, the housekeeper took even a more gloomy view
than Morgan of the approaching event. When I had explained all
the circumstances to her, she carefully put down her basket,
crossed her arms, and said to me in slow, deliberate, mysterious
tones:
"You want my advice about what's to be done with this young
woman? Well, sir, here's my advice: Don't you trouble your head
about her. It won't be no use. Mind, I tell you, it won't be no
use."
"What do you mean?"
"You look at this place, sir--it's more like a prison than a
house, isn't it? You, look at us as lives in it. We've got
(saving your presence) a foot apiece in our graves, haven't we?
When you was young yourself, sir, what would you have done if
they had shut you up for six weeks in such a place as this, among
your grandfathers and grandmothers, with their feet in the
grave?"
"I really can't say."
"I can, sir. You'd have run away. She'll run away. Don't you
worry your head about her--she'll save you the trouble. I tell
you again, she'll run away."
With those ominous words the housekeeper took up her basket,
sighed heavily, and left me.
I sat down under a tree quite helpless. Here was the whole
responsibility shifted upon my miserable shoulders. Not a lady in
the neighborhood to whom I could apply for assistance, and the
nearest shop eight miles distant from us. The toughest case I
ever had to conduct, when I was at the Bar, was plain sailing
compared with the difficulty of receiving our fair guest.
It was absolutely necessary, however, to decide at once where she
was to sleep. All the rooms in the tower were of stone--dark,
gloomy, and cold even in the summer-time. Impossible to put her
in any one of them. The only other alternative was to lodge her
in the little modern lean-to, which I have already described as
being tacked on to the side of the old building. It contained
three cottage-rooms, and they might be made barely habitable for
a young lady. But then those rooms were occupied by Morgan. His
books were in one, his bed was in another, his pipes and general
lumber were in the third. Could I expect him, after the sour
similitudes he had used in reference to our expected visitor, to
turn out of his habitation and disarrange all his habits for her
convenience? The bare idea of proposing the thing to him seemed
ridiculous; and yet inexorable necessity left me no choice but to
make the hopeless experiment. I walked back to the tower hastily
and desperately, to face the worst that might happen before my
courage cooled altogether.
On crossing the threshold of the hall door I was stopped, to my
great amazement, by a procession of three of the farm-servants,
followed by Morgan, all walking after each other, in Indian file,
toward the spiral staircase that led to the top of the tower. The
first of the servants carried the materials for making a fire;
the second bore an inverted arm-chair on his head; the third
tottered under a heavy load of books; while Morgan came last,
with his canister of tobacco in his hand, his dressing-gown over
his shoulders, and his whole collection of pipes hugged up
together in a bundle under his arm.
"What on earth does this mean?" I inquired.
"It means taking Time by the forelock," answered Morgan, looking
at me with a smile of sour satisfaction. "I've got the start of
your young woman, Griffith, and I'm making the most of it."
"But where, in Heaven's name, are you going?" I asked, as the
head man of the procession disappeared with his firing up the
staircase.
"How high is this tower?" retorted Morgan.
"Seven stories, to be sure," I replied.
"Very good," said my eccentric brother, setting his foot on the
first stair, "I'm going up to the seventh."
"You can't," I shouted.
"_She_ can't, you mean," said Morgan, "and that's exactly why I'm
going there."
"But the room is not furnished."
"It's out of her reach."
"One of the windows has fallen to pieces."
"It's out of her reach."
"There's a crow's nest in the corner."
"It's out of her reach."
By the time this unanswerable argument had attained its third
repetition, Morgan, in his turn, had disappeared up the winding
stairs. I knew him too well to attempt any further protest.
Here was my first difficulty smoothed away most unexpectedly; for
here were the rooms in the lean-to placed by their owner's free
act and deed at my disposal. I wrote on the spot to the one
upholsterer of our distant county town to come immediately and
survey the premises, and sent off a mounted messenger with the
letter. This done, and the necessary order also dispatched to the
carpenter and glazier to set them at work on Morgan's sky-parlor
in the seventh story, I began to feel, for the first time, as if
my scattered wits were coming back to me. By the time the evening
had closed in I had hit on no less than three excellent ideas,
all providing for the future comfort and amusement of our fair
guest. The first idea was to get her a Welsh pony; the second was
to hire a piano from the county town; the third was to send for a
boxful of novels from London. I must confess I thought these
projects for pleasing her very happily conceived, and Owen agreed
with me. Morgan, as usual, took the opposite view. He said she
would yawn over the novels, turn up her nose at the piano, and
fracture her skull with the pony. As for the housekeeper, she
stuck to her text as stoutly in the evening as she had stuck to
it in the morning. "Pianner or no pianner, story-book or no
story-book, pony or no pony, you mark my words, sir--that young
woman will run away."
Such were the housekeeper's parting words when she wished me
good-night.
When the next morning came, and brought with it that terrible
waking time which sets a man's hopes and projects before him, the
great as well as the small, stripped bare of every illusion, it
is not to be concealed that I felt less sanguine of our success
in entertaining the coming guest. So far as external preparations
were concerned, there seemed, indeed, but little to improve; but
apart from these, what had we to offer, in ourselves and our
society, to attract her? There lay the knotty point of the
question, and there the grand difficulty of finding an answer.
I fall into serious reflection while I am dressing on the
pursuits and occupations with which we three brothers have been
accustomed, for years past, to beguile the time. Are they at all
likely, in the case of any one of us, to interest or amuse her?
My chief occupation, to begin with the youngest, consists, in
acting as steward on Owen's property. The routine of my duties
has never lost its sober attraction to my tastes, for it has
always employed me in watching the best interests of my brother,
and of my son also, who is one day to be his heir. But can I
expect our fair guest to sympathize with such family concerns as
these? Clearly not.
Morgan's pursuit comes next in order of review--a pursuit of a
far more ambitious nature than mine. It was always part of my
second brother's whimsical, self-contradictory character to view
with the profoundest contempt the learned profession by which he
gained his livelihood, and he is now occupying the long leisure
hours of his old age in composing a voluminous treatise,
intended, one of these days, to eject the whole body corporate of
doctors from the position which they have usurped in the
estimation of their fellow-creatures. This daring work is
entitled "An Examination of the Claims of Medicine on the
Gratitude of Mankind. Decided in the Negative by a Retired
Physician." So far as I can tell, the book is likely to extend to
the dimensions of an Encyclopedia; for it is Morgan's plan to
treat his comprehensive subject principally from the historical
point of view, and to run down all the doctors of antiquity, one
after another, in regular succession, from the first of the
tribe. When I last heard of his progress he was hard on the heels
of Hippocrates, but had no immediate prospect of tripping up his
successor, Is this the sort of occupation (I ask myself) in which
a modern young lady is likely to feel the slightest interest?
Once again, clearly not.
Owen's favorite employment is, in its way, quite as
characteristic as Morgan's, and it has the great additional
advantage of appealing to a much larger variety of tastes. My
eldest brother--great at drawing and painting when he was a lad,
always interested in artists and their works in after life--has
resumed, in his declining years, the holiday occupation of his
schoolboy days. As an amateur landscape-painter, he works with
more satisfaction to himself, uses more color, wears out more
brushes, and makes a greater smell of paint in his studio than
any artist by profession, native or foreign, whom I ever met
with. In look, in manner, and in disposition, the gentlest of
mankind, Owen, by some singular anomaly in his character, which
he seems to have caught from Morgan, glories placidly in the
wildest and most frightful range of subjects which his art is
capable of representing. Immeasurable ruins, in howling
wildernesses, with blood-red sunsets gleaming over them;
thunder-clouds rent with lightning, hovering over splitting trees
on the verges of awful precipices; hurricanes, shipwrecks, waves,
and whirlpools follow each other on his canvas, without an
intervening glimpse of quiet everyday nature to relieve the
succession of pictorial horrors. When I see him at his easel, so
neat and quiet, so unpretending and modest in himself, with such
a composed expression on his attentive face, with such a weak
white hand to guide such bold, big brushes, and when I look at
the frightful canvasful of terrors which he is serenely
aggravating in fierceness and intensity with every successive
touch, I find it difficult to realize the connection between my
brother and his work, though I see them before me not six inches
apart. Will this quaint spectacle possess any humorous
attractions for Miss Jessie? Perhaps it may. There is some slight
chance that Owen's employment will be lucky enough to interest
her.
Thus far my morning cogitations advance doubtfully enough, but
they altogether fail in carrying me beyond the narrow circle of
The Glen Tower. I try hard, in our visitor's interest, to look
into the resources of the little world around us, and I find my
efforts rewarded by the prospect of a total blank.
Is there any presentable living soul in the neighborhood whom we
can invite to meet her? Not one. There are, as I have already
said, no country seats near us; and society in the county town
has long since learned to regard us as three misanthropes,
strongly suspected, from our monastic way of life and our dismal
black costume, of being popish priests in disguise. In other
parts of England the clergyman of the parish might help us out of
our difficulty; but here in South Wales, and in this latter half
of the nineteenth century, we have the old type parson of the
days of Fielding still in a state of perfect preservation. Our
local clergyman receives a stipend which is too paltry to bear
comparison with the wages of an ordinary mechanic. In dress,
manners, and tastes he is about on a level with the upper class
of agricultural laborer. When attempts have been made by
well-meaning gentlefolks to recognize the claims of his
profession by asking him to their houses, he has been known, on
more than one occasion, to leave his plowman's pair of shoes in
the hall, and enter the drawing-room respectfully in his
stockings. Where he preaches, miles and miles away from us and
from the poor cottage in which he lives, if he sees any of the
company in the squire's pew yawn or fidget in their places, he
takes it as a hint that they are tired of listening, and closes
his sermon instantly at the end of the sentence. Can we ask this
most irreverend and unclerical of men to meet a young lady? I
doubt, even if we made the attempt, whether we should succeed, by
fair means, in getting him beyond the servants' hall.
Dismissing, therefore, all idea of inviting visitors to entertain
our guest, and feeling, at the same time, more than doubtful of
her chance of discovering any attraction in the sober society of
the inmates of the house, I finish my dressing and go down to
breakfast, secretly veering round to the housekeeper's opinion
that Miss Jessie will really bring matters to an abrupt
conclusion by running away. I find Morgan as bitterly resigned to
his destiny as ever, and Owen so affectionately anxious to make himself of
some use, and so lamentably ignorant of how to begin, that I am
driven to disembarrass myself of him at the outset by a
stratagem.
I suggest to him that our visitor is sure to be interested in
pictures, and that it would be a pretty attention, on his part,
to paint her a landscape to hang up in her room. Owen brightens
directly, informs me in his softest tones that he is then at work
on the Earthquake at Lisbon, and inquires whether I think she
would like that subject. I preserve my gravity sufficiently to
answer in the affirmative, and my brother retires meekly to his
studio, to depict the engulfing of a city and the destruction of
a population. Morgan withdraws in his turn to the top of the
tower, threatening, when our guest comes, to draw all his meals
up to his new residence by means of a basket and string. I am
left alone for an hour, and then the upholsterer arrives from the
county town.
This worthy man, on being informed of our emergency, sees his
way, apparently, to a good stroke of business, and thereupon wins
my lasting gratitude by taking, in opposition to every one else,
a bright and hopeful view of existing circumstances.
"You'll excuse me, sir," he says, confidentially, when I show him
the rooms in the lean-to, "but this is a matter of experience.
I'm a family man myself, with grown-up daughters of my own, and
the natures of young women are well known to me. Make their rooms
comfortable, and you make 'em happy. Surround their lives, sir,
with a suitable atmosphere of furniture, and you never hear a
word of complaint drop from their lips. Now, with regard to these
rooms, for example, sir--you put a neat French bedstead in that
corner, with curtains conformable--say a tasty chintz; you put on
that bedstead what I will term a sufficiency of bedding; and you
top up with a sweet little eider-down quilt, as light as roses,
and similar the same in color. You do that, and what follows? You
please her eye when she lies down at night, and you please her
eye when she gets up in the morning--and you're all right so far,
and so is she. I will not dwell, sir, on the toilet-table, nor
will I seek to detain you about the glass to show her figure, and
the other glass to show her face, because I have the articles in
stock, and will be myself answerable for their effect on a lady's
mind and person."
He led the way into the next room as he spoke, and arranged its
future fittings, and decorations, as he had already planned out
the bedroom, with the strictest reference to the connection which
experience had shown him to exist between comfortable furniture
and female happiness.
Thus far, in my helpless state of mind, the man's confidence had
impressed me in spite of myself, and I had listened to him in
superstitious silence. But as he continued to rise, by regular
gradations, from one climax of upholstery to another, warning
visions of his bill disclosed themselves in the remote background
of the scene of luxury and magnificence which my friend was
conjuring up. Certain sharp professional instincts of bygone
times resumed their influence over me; I began to start doubts
and ask questions; and as a necessary consequence the interview
between us soon assumed something like a practical form.
Having ascertained what the probable expense of furnishing would
amount to and having discovered that the process of transforming
the lean-to (allowing for the time required to procure certain
articles of rarity from Bristol) would occupy nearly a fortnight,
I dismissed the upholsterer with the understanding that I should
take a day or two for consideration, and let him know the result.
It was then the fifth of September, and our Queen of Hearts was
to arrive on the twentieth. The work, therefore, if it was begun
on the seventh or eighth, would be begun in time.
In making all my calculations with a reference to the twentieth
of September, I relied implicitly, it will be observed, on a
young lady's punctuality in keeping an appointment which she had
herself made. I can only account for such extraordinary
simplicity on my part on the supposition that my wits had become
sadly rusted by long seclusion from society. Whether it was
referable to this cause or not, my innocent trustfulness was at
any rate destined to be practically rebuked before long in the
most surprising manner. Little did I suspect, when I parted from
the upholsterer on the fifth of the month, what the tenth of the
month had in store for me.
On the seventh I made up my mind to have the bedroom furnished at
once, and to postpone the question of the sitting-room for a few
days longer. Having dispatched the necessary order to that
effect, I next wrote to hire the piano and to order the box of
novels. This done, I congratulated myself on the forward state of
the preparations, and sat down to repose in the atmosphere of my
own happy delusions.
On the ninth the wagon arrived with the furniture, and the men
set to work on the bedroom. From this moment Morgan retired
definitely to the top of the tower, and Owen became too nervous
to lay the necessary amount of paint on the Earthquake at Lisbon.
On the tenth the work was proceeding bravely. Toward noon Owen
and I strolled to the door to enjoy the fine autumn sunshine. We
were sitting lazily on our favorite bench in front of the tower
when we were startled by a shout from above us. Looking up
directly, we saw Morgan half in and half out of his narrow window
In the seventh story, gesticulating violently with the stem of
his long meerschaum pipe in the direction of the road below us.
We gazed eagerly in the quarter thus indicated, but our low
position prevented us for some time from seeing anything. At last
we both discerned an old yellow post-chaise distinctly and
indisputably approaching us.
Owen and I looked at one another in panic-stricken silence. It
was coming to us--and what did it contain? Do pianos travel in
chaises? Are boxes of novels conveyed to their destination by a
postilion? We expected the piano and expected the novels, but
nothing else--unquestionably nothing else.
The chaise took the turn in the road, passed through the gateless
gap in our rough inclosure-wall of loose stone, and rapidly
approached us. A bonnet appeared at the window and a hand gayly
waved a white handkerchief.
Powers of caprice, confusion, and dismay! It was Jessie Yelverton
herself--arriving, without a word of warning, exactly ten days
before her time.
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