Love Me Little, Love Me Long Part 19

"A little," with an angry sneer.

"Has he betrayed your confidence?"

"Hasn't he?"

"Oh dear! What has he done?"

"Died, that is all," snarled the victim.

"Oh, uncle! Poor man!"

"Poor man, no doubt. But how about poor me? Why, it turns out I am sole executor."

"But, dear uncle, how could the poor soul help dying?"

"That is not candid, Lucy," said Mr. Fountain, severely. "Did ever I say he could help dying? But he could help coming here under false colors, a mahogany face, and trapping his friend."

"Uncle, what is the use--your trying to play the misanthrope with me, who know how good you are, in spite of your pretenses to the contrary?

To hide your emotion from your poor niece, you go into a feigned fury, and all the time you know how sorry you are your poor friend is gone."

"Of course I am. He has secured one mourner. He might have died to all eternity if he hadn't nailed me first. See how selfish men are, and bad-hearted into the bargain. I believe that young fellow had been to a doctor, and found out he was booked in spite of his mahogany cheeks; so then he rides out here and wheedles an unguarded friend--I'm wired--I'm trapped--I'm snared."

Lucy set herself to soothe her injured relative. "You must say to yourself, _'C'est un pet.i.t matheur.'"_

"Tell myself a falsehood? What shall I gain by that? Let me tell you, it is these minor troubles that send a man to Bedlam. One breeds another, till they swarm and buzz you distracted, and sting you dead.

_'Pet.i.t maiheur!'_ it is a greater one than you have ever encountered since you have been under _my_ wing."

"It is, dear, it is; but I hope to encounter much greater ones before I am your age."

"The deuce you do!"

"Or else I shall die without ever having lived--a vegetable, not a human being."

"Bombast! a 'flower' your lovers will call you."

"And men of sense a 'weed.' But don't let us discuss me. What I wish to know is the nature of your annoyance, dear." He explained to her with a groan that he should have to wind up all the affairs of an estate of 8,000 pounds a year, pay the annual and other enc.u.mbrances, etc., etc.

"Well, but, dear, you will be quite at home in this, you have such a turn for business."

"For my own," shrieked the old bachelor, angrily, "not for other people's. Why, Lucy, there will be half a dozen separate accounts, all of four figures. It is not as if executors were paid. And why are they not paid? There ought to be a law compelling the estates they administer to pay them, and handsomely. It never occurred to me before, but now I see the monstrous iniquity of amateur executors, amateur trustees, amateur guardians. They take business out of the hands of those who live by business. I sincerely regret my share in this injustice. If a sn.o.b works, he always expects to be paid! how much more a gentleman. He ought to be paid double--once for the work, and once for giving up his natural ease. Here am I, guardian gratis to a cub of sixteen--the worst age--done school, and not begun Oxford and governesses."

"Tutors, you mean."

"Do I? Is it the tutors the whelps fall in love with, little goose?

Stop; I'll describe my 'interesting charge,' as the books call it. He has hair you could not tell from tow. He has no eyebrows--a little unfledged slippery horror. He used to come in to dessert, and turn all our stomachs except his silly father's."

"Poor orphan!"

"When you speak to him he never answers--blushes instead."

"Poor child!"

"He has read of eloquent blushes, and thinks there is no need to reply in words--blus.h.i.+ng must be such an interesting and effective subst.i.tute."

"Poor boy, he wants a little judicious kindness. We will have him here."

"Here!" cried the old gentleman, with horror. "What! make Font Abbey a kennel!!! No, Lucy, no, this house is sacred; no nuisances admitted here. Here, on this single spot of earth, reigns comfort, and shall reign unruffled while I live. This is the temple of peace. If I must be worried, I must, but not beneath this hallowed roof."

This eloquence, delivered as it was with a sudden solemnity, told upon the mind.

"Dear Font Abbey," murmured Lucy, half closing her eyes, "how well you describe it! Societies of the cosey; the walls seem padded, the carpets velvet, and the whole structure care-proof; all is quiet gayety and sweet punctuality. Here comfort and good humor move by clock-work; that is Font Abbey. Yet you are right; if you were to be seen in it no more, it would lose the life of its charm, dear Uncle Fountain."

"Thank you, my dear--thank you. I do like to see my friends about me comfortable, and, above all, to be comfortable myself. The place is well enough, and I am bitterly sorry I must leave it, and sorry to leave you, my dear."

"Leave us? not immediately?"

"This very day. Why, the funeral is to be this week--a grand funeral--and I have to order it all. Then there are relatives to be invited--thirty letters--others to be asked to the reading of the will. It will be one hurry-scurry till we get the house clear of the corpse and the vultures; then at it I must go, head-foremost, into fathomless addition--subtraction--multiplication, and vexation. 'Oh, now forever farewell, something or other--farewell content!' You talk of misanthropy. I shall end there. Lucy."

"Yes, dear uncle."

"I never--do--a good-natured thing--but--I--bitterly--repent it. By Jupiter! the coffee is cold; the first time that has befallen me since I turned off seven servants that battled that point of comfort with me."

Lucy suggested that the coffee might have cooled a little while he was being so kind as to answer her question at unusual length. Then she came round to him bringing a fresh supply of fragrant slow poison, and sat beside him and soothed him till his ire went down, and came the calm depression of a man who, accustomed for many years to do just what he liked, found himself suddenly obliged to do something he did not like--a thing out of the groove of his habits too.

Sure enough, he left Font Abbey the same day, with a promise, exacted by Lucy, that he should make her the partner of all his vexations by writing to her every day.

"And, Lucy," said the old Parthian, as he stepped into his traveling-carriage, "my friend Talboys will miss me; pray be kind to him while I am away. He is a particular friend of mine. I may be wrong, but I do like men of known origin--of old family."

"And you are right. I will be kind to him for your sake, dear."

A slight cold confined Lucy to the house for three or four days after her uncle's departure (by the by, I think this must have been the reason of David's ill success in his endeavors to get an interview with her out of doors).

Thus circ.u.mstanced, ladies rummage.

Lucy found in a garret a chest containing a quant.i.ty of papers and parchments, and the beautifulest dust. No such dust is made in these degenerate days. Some of these MSS. bore recent dates, and were easily legible, though not so easily intelligible, being written as Gratiano spake.* The writers had omitted to put the idea'd words into red ink, so they had to be picked out with infinite difficulty from the mult.i.tude of unidea'd ones.

* "Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing . . . . his reasons are as three grains of wheat in two bushels of chaff."

Other of the MSS., more ancient, wore a double veil. They hid their sense in verbiage, and also in narrow Germanifled letters, farther deformed by contractions and ornamental flourishes, whose joint effect made a word look like a black daddy-long-legs, all sprawling fantastic limbs and the body a dot.

The perusal of these pieces was slow and painful; it was like walking or slipping about among broken ruins overgrown with nettles. But then Uncle Fountain was so anxious to hook on to the Flunkeys--oh, Ciel!

what am I saying?--the Funteyns, and his direct genealogical evidence had so completely broken down. She said to herself, "Oh dear! if I could find something among these old writings, and show it him on his return." She had them all dusted and brought down, and a table-cloth laid on a long table in the drawing-room, and spelled them with a good-humored patience that belonged partly to her character, partly to her s.e.x. A female who undertakes this sort of work does not skip as we should; the habit of needle-work in all its branches reconciles that portion of mankind to invisible progress in other matters.

Besides this, they are naturally careful, and, above all, born to endure, they carry patience into nearly all they do.*

* At about the third rehearsal of a new play our actresses bring the author's words into their heads, our actors are still all abroad, and at the first performance the breaks- down are sure to be among the males; the female jumenta carry their burden (be it of pig-lead) safe from wing to wing.

Lucy made her way manfully through all the well-written circ.u.mlocution, and in a very short time considering; but the antique [Greek] tried her eyes too much at night, so she gave nearly her whole day to it, for she was anxious to finish all before her uncle's return. It was a curious picture--Venus immersed in musty records.