Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 26

"Ah, Mr. Keane, is that you? Come in."

The permission was needless, insomuch as Keane was already in and down on a rocking-chair.

"One o'clock, and only just begun your breakfast! I have finished more than half my day's work."

"I dare say," answered Sydie; "but one s.h.i.+ning light like you, monseigneur, is enough for a college. Why should I exert myself? I swore I hadn't four marks a year, and I've my fellows.h.i.+p for telling the furbelow. We all go in for the dolce here except you, and you're such a patent machine for turning out Q. E. D.s by the dozen, that you can no more help working than the bed-maker can help taking my tea and saying the cat did it, and 'May she never be forgiven if she ever so much as looked at that there blessed lock.' I say, find a Q. E. D. for me, to the most vexatious problem, where I'm to go this Long?"

"Go a quiet reading tour; mark out a regular plan, and travel somewhere rugged and lonely, with not a crinoline, or a trout-stream, or a pack of hounds within a hundred miles; the middle of Stonehenge, for example, or with the lighthouse men out at the Smalls or Eddystone. You'd do wonders when you came back, Sydie."

Sydie shook his head and puffed gravely at his pipe.

"Thank you, sir. Cramming's not my line. As for history, I don't see anything particularly interesting in the blackguardisms of men all dust and ashes and gelatine now; if I were the Prince of Wales, I might think it my duty to inquire into the characters of my grandfathers; but not being that individual, I find the Derby list much more suited to my genius. As for the cla.s.sics, they won't help me to ask for my dinner at Tortoni's, nor to ingratiate myself with the women at the Maison Doree; and I prefer following Ovid's counsels, and enjoying the Falernian of life represented in these days by milk-punch, to plodding through the De Officiis. As for mathematics, it _may_ be something very grand to draw triangles and circles till A meets B because C is as long as D; but I know, when I did the same operation in chalk when I was a small actor on the nursery floor, my nurse (who might have gone along with the barbarian who stuck Archimedes) called me an idle brat. Well, I say, about the Long? Where are _you_ going, most grave and reverent seignior?"

"Where there are no impertinent boys, if there be such a paradise on earth," rejoined Keane, lighting his pipe. "I go to my moor, of course, for the 12th, but until then I haven't made up my mind. I think I shall scamper over South America; I want freshening up, and I've a great fancy to see those buried cities, not to mention a chance of buffalo hunting."

"Travelling's such a bore," interrupted Sydie, stretching himself out like an india-rubber tube. "Talk of the cherub that's always sitting up aloft to watch over poor Jack, there are always ten thousand demons watching over the life of any luckless aeothen; there are the custom-house men, whose natural prey he becomes, and the hotel-keepers, who fasten on him to suck his life-blood, and there are the mosquitoes, and other things less minute but not less agonizing; and there are guides and muleteers, and waiters and ciceroni--oh, hang it!

travelling's a dreadful bore, if it were only for the inevitable widow with four daughters whom you've danced with once at a charity ball, who rushes up to you on the Boulevards or a Rhine steamer, and tacks herself on to you, and whom it's well for you if you can shake off when you scatter the dust of the city from the sole of your foot."

"You can't chatter, can you?"

"Yes; my fraenum was happily cut when I was a baby. Fancy what a loss the world would have endured if it hadn't been!" said Sydie, lazily shutting his half-closed blue eyes. "I say, the governor has been bothering my life out to go down to St. Crucis; he's an old brick, you know, and has the primest dry in the kingdom. I wish you'd come, will you? There's capital fis.h.i.+ng and cricketing, and you'd keep me company. Do. You shall have the best mount in the kingdom, and the General will do you no end of good on Hippocrate's rule--contrarieties cure contrarieties."

"I'll think about it; but you know I prefer solitude generally; misanthropical, I admit, but decidedly lucky for me, as my companions through life will always be my ink-stand, my terrier, and my papers. I have never wished for any other yet, and I hope I never shall. Are you going to smoke and drink audit on that sofa all day?"

"No," answered Sydie, "I'm going to take a turn at beer and Brown's for a change. Well, I shall take you down with me on Tuesday, sir, so that's settled."

Keane laughed, and after some few words on the business that had brought him thither, went across the quad to his own rooms to plunge into the intricacies of Fourrier and Laplace, or give the vigor of his brain to stuffing some young goose's empty head, or cramming some idle young dog with ballast enough to carry him through the shoals and quicksands of his Greats.

Gerald Keane was a mathematical Coach, and had taken high honors--a rare thing for a Kingsman to do, for are they not, by their own confession, the laziest disciples of the dolce in the whole of Granta, invariably b.u.mped and caught out, and from sheer idleness letting other men beat Lord's and shame the Oxford Eleven, and graduate with Double Firsts, while they lie perdus in the shades of Holy Henry? Keane, however, was the one exception to the rule. He was dreadfully wild, as ladies say, for his first term or two, though equally eloquent at the Union; then his family exulting in the accuracies of their prophecies regarding his worthlessness, and somebody else daring him to go in for honors, his pluck was put up, and he set himself to work to show them all what he could do if he chose. Once roused to put out his powers, he liked using them; the bother of the training over, it is no trouble to keep place as stroke-oar; and now men pointed him out in the Senate House, and at the Senior Fellows' table, and he bid fair to rank with the writer on Jasher and the author of the Inductive Sciences.

People called him very cold. It was popularly averred that he had no more feeling than Roubilliac's or Thorwaldsen's statues; but as he was a great favorite with the under-grads, and always good-natured to them, there were a few men who doubted the theory, though _he_ never tried to refute or dispute it.

Of all the young fellows, the one Keane liked the best, and to whom he was kindest, was Sydenham Morton--Sydie to everybody in Granta, from the little fleuriste opposite in King's Parade, to the V. P.'s wife, who petted him because his uncle was a millionnaire--the dearest fellow in the world, according to all the Cambridge young ladies--the darling of all the milliner and confectioner girls in Trumpington Street and Petty Cury--the best chap going among the kindred spirits, who got gated, and lectured, and rusticated for skying over to Newmarket, or pommelling bargees, or taking a lark over at Cherryhinton--the best-dressed, fastest, and most charming of Cantabs, as he himself would gravely a.s.sure you.

They were totally dissimilar, and far asunder in position; but an affair on the slope of the Matterhorn, when the boy had saved the elder man's life, had riveted attachment between them, and bridged over the difference of their academical rank.

The Commencement came and went, with its speeches, and its H.R.H.

Chancellor, and its pretty women gliding among the elms of Neville's Court (poor Leslie Ellis's daily haunt), filling the grim benches of the Senate House, and flitting past the carved benches of King's Chapel.

Granta was henceforth a desert to all Cambridge belles; they could walk down Trumpington Street without meeting a score of little straw hats, and Trumpington Street became as odious as Sahara; the "darling Backs"

were free to them, and, of course, they who, by all relations, from those of Genesis to those of Vanity Fair, have never cared, save for _fruit defendu_, saw nothing to admire in the trees, and gra.s.s, and river, minus outriggers and collegians. There was a general exodus: Masters' red hoods, Fellows Commoners' gold-lace, Fellows' gown and mortar boards, morning chapel surplices, and under-grads' straw-hats and cutaway coats, all vanished from court and library, street and cloister.

Cambridge was empty; the married Dons and their families went off to country-houses or Rhine steamers; Fellows went touring with views to mediaeval architecture, Roman remains, Greek inscriptions, Paris laisser aller, or Norwegian fis.h.i.+ng, according to their tastes and habits; under-grads scattered themselves over the face of the globe, and were to be found in knots of two or three calling for stout in Vefour's, kicking up a row with Austrian gendarmerie, chalking up effigies of Bomba on Italian walls, striding up every mountain from Skiddaw to the Pic du Midi, burrowing like rabbits in a warren for reading purposes on Dartmoor, kissing sunny-haired Gretchens in German hostelries, swinging through the Vaterland with knapsacks and sticks, doing a walking tour--in fact, swarming everywhere with their impossible French and hearty voices, and lithe English muscle, Granta marked on them as distinctly as an M.B. waistcoat marks an Anglican, or utter ignorance of modern politics a "great cla.s.sic."

Cambridge had emptied itself of the scores of naughty boys that lie in the arms of Mater, and on Tuesday Keane and Sydie were shaking and rattling over those dreadful nervous Eastern Counties tenders, through that picturesque and beautiful country that does permutations with such laudable perseverance on pollards, fens, and flats--flats, fens, and pollards--at the snail's pace that, according to the E.G.R., we must believe to be "express."

"I wrote and told the governor you were coming down with me, sir," said Sydie, hanging up his hat. "I didn't tell him what a trouble I had to make you throw over South America for a fortnight, and come and taste his curry at the Beeches. You'll like the old boy; he's as hot and choleric, and as genial and good-hearted, as any old brick that ever walked. He was born as sweet-tempered and soft-mouthed as mamma when an eldest son waltzes twice with Adeliza, and the pepper's been put into him by the curry-powder, the gentlemanlike transportation, and the unlimited command over black devils, enjoyed by gentlemen of the H.E.I.C.S."

"A nabob uncle," thought Keane. "Oh, I see, yellow, dyspeptic, always boring one with 'How to govern India,' and recollections of 'When I served with Napier.' What a fool I was to let Sydie persuade me to go. A month in Lima and the Pampas would be much pleasanter."

"He came over last year," continued Sydie, in blissful ignorance, "and bought the Beeches, a very jolly place, only he's crammed it with everything anybody suggested, and tried anything that any farmer recommended, so that the house and the estate present a peculiar compendium of all theories of architecture, and a general exhibition of all sorts of tastes. He's his hobbies; pouncing on and apprehending small boys is one of 'em, for which practice he is endeared to the youth of St. Crucis as the 'old cove,' the 'Injian devil,' and like affectionate cognomens. But the General's weak point is me--me and little Fay."

"His mare, I suppose?"

"His mare!--bless my heart, no!--his mare!" And Sydie lay back, and laughed silently. "His mare! By George! what would she say? She's a good deal too lively a young lady to run in harness for anybody, though she's soft-mouthed enough when she's led. Mare! No, Fay's his niece--my cousin. Her father and my father went to glory when we were both smalls, and left us in legacy to the General, and a pretty pot of money the legacy has cost him."

"Your cousin, indeed! The name's more like a mare's than a girl's,"

answered Keane, thinking to himself. "A cousin! I just wish I'd known that. One of those Indian girls, I bet, tanned brown as a berry, flirts a outrance, has run the gauntlet of all the Calcutta b.a.l.l.s, been engaged to men in all the Arms, talks horridly broad Anglo-Indian-English. I know the style."

The engine screamed, and pulled up at the St. Crucis station, some seventy miles farther on, lying in the midst of Creswickian landscapes, with woodlands, and cottages, and sweet fresh stretches of meadow-land, such as do one's heart good after hard days and late nights in dust and gaslight.

"Deuced fine points," said Sydie, taking the ribbons of a high-stepping bay that had brought one of the neatest possible traps to take him and Keane to the Beeches, and springing, in all his glory, to the box, than which no imperial throne could have offered to him one-half so delightful a seat. "Governor never keeps screws. What a crying shame we're not allowed to keep the sorriest hack at King's. That comes of gentlemen slipping into shoes that were meant for beggars. Hallo, there are the old beech-trees; I vow I can almost taste the curry and dry from looking at them."

In dashed the bay through the park-gates, sending the s.h.i.+ngle flying up in small simoons, and the rooks cawing in supreme surprise from their nests in the branches of the beech-trees.

"Hallo, my ancient, how are you?" began Sydie to the butler, while that stately person expanded into a smile of welcome. "Down, dog, down! 'Pon my life, the old place looks very jolly. What have you hung all that armor up for;--to make believe our ancestors dwelt in these marble halls? How devilish dusty I am. Where's the General? Didn't know we were coming till next train. Fay! Fay! where are you? Ashton, where's Miss Morton?"

"Here, Sydie dear," cried the young lady in question, rus.h.i.+ng across the hall with the most ecstatic delight, and throwing herself into the Cantab's arms, who received her with no less cordiality, and kissed her straightway, regardless of the presence of Keane, the butler, and Harris.

"Oh, Sydie," began the young lady, breathlessly, "I'm so delighted you're come. There's the archery fete, and a picnic at Shallowton, and an election ball over at Coverdale, and I want you to dance with me, and to try the new billiard-table, and to come and see my aviary, and to teach me pistol-shooting (because Julia Dupuis can shoot splendidly, and talks of joining the Rifles), and to show me how to do Euclid, and to amuse me, and to play with me, and to tell me which is the prettiest of Snowdrop's pups to be saved, and to----" She stopped suddenly, and dropped from enthusiastic tirade to subdued surprise, as she caught sight of Keane for the first time. "Oh, Sydie, why did you not introduce me to your friend? How rude I have been!"

"Mr. Keane, my cousin, the torment of my existence, Miss Morton in public, Little Fay in private life. There, you know one another now. I can't say any more. Do tell me where the governor is."

"Mr. Keane, what can you think of me?" cried Fay. "Any friend of Sydenham's is most welcome to the Beeches, and my uncle will scold me frightfully for giving you such a reception. Please do forgive me, I was so delighted to see my cousin."

"Which I can fully enter into, having a weakness for Sydie myself,"

smiled Keane. "I am sure he is very fortunate in being the cause of such an excuse."

Keane said it _par complaisance_, but rather carelessly; young ladies, as a cla.s.s, being one of his aversions. He looked at Fay Morton, however, and saw she was not an Indianized girl after all. She was not yellow, but, au contraire, had waving fair hair, long dark eyes, and a mischievous, sunny face--

A rosebud set with little wilful thorns, And sweet as English air could make her.

"Where's the governor, Fay?" reiterated Sydie.

"Here, my dear boy. Thought of your old uncle the first thing, Sydie?

G.o.d bless my soul, how well you look! Confound you, why didn't you tell me what train you were coming by? Devil take you, Ashton, why's there no fire in the hall? Thought it was warm, did you? Hum! more fool you then."

"Uncle dear," said Miss Fay, "here is Sydie's friend, Mr. Keane; you are being as rude as I have been."

The General, at this conjuration, swung sharp round, a stout, hale, handsome old fellow, with gray moustaches and a high color, holding a spade in his hand and clad in a linen coat.

"Bless my soul, sir," cried the General, shaking Keane's hand with the greatest possible energy, "charmed to see you--delighted, 'pon my honor; only hope you're come to stay till Christmas; there are plenty of bachelors' dens. Devil take me! of what was I thinking? I was pleased to see that boy, I suppose. More fool I, you'll say, a lazy, good-for-nothing young dog like him. Don't let me keep you standing in the hall. Cursed cold, isn't it? and there's Little Fay in muslin!

Ashton, send some hot water into the west room for Mr.--Mr.----Confound you, Sydie, why didn't you tell--I mean introduce me?--Mr. Keane.

Luncheon will be on the table in ten minutes. Like curry, Mr. Keane?

There, get along, Sydie, you foolish boy; you can talk to Fay after luncheon."

"Sydie," whispered Fay, an hour before dinner, when she had teased the Cantab's life out of him till he had consented to p.r.o.nounce judgment on the puppies, "what a splendid head that man has you brought with you; he'd do for Plato, with that grand calm brow and lofty unapproachable look. Who is he?"

"The greatest philosopher of modern times," responded her cousin, solemnly. "A condensation of Solon, Thales, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, Lucullus, Bion, Theophrastes, and Co.; such a giant of mathematical knowledge, and all other knowledge, too, that every day, when he pa.s.ses under Bacon's Gate, we are afraid the old legend will come to pa.s.s, and it will tumble down as flat as a pancake; a homage to him, but a loss to Cambridge."