"Going through it all over again when you've done it once before,"

continues this young philosopher. The Major thinks of asking why it should be rummer the second time than the first, but decides not to, and sips his toddy, and pats the hand that is under his. In a hazy, fossil-like way he perceives that to a young girl's mind the "rumness"

of a second husband is exactly proportionate to the readiness of its acceptance of the first. Unity is just as intrinsic a quality of a first husband as the colour of his eyes or hair. Moreover, he is expected to outlive you. Above all, he is perfectly natural and a matter of course. We discern in all this a sneaking tribute to an idea of a hereafter; but the Major didn't go so far as that.

"She looked very jolly over it," said he, retreating on generalities.

"So did he."

"Gaffer Fenwick? I should think so indeed! Well he might!" Then, after a moment's consideration: "He looked like my idea of Sir Richard Grenville. It's only an idea. I forget what he did. Elizabethan johnny."

"What do you call him? Gaffer Fenwick? You're a nice, respectable young monkey! Well, he's not half a bad-looking fellow; well set up." But none of this, though good in itself, is what Sally sat down to talk about. A sudden change in her manner, a new earnestness, makes the Major stop an incipient yawn he is utilising as an exordium to a hint that we ought to go to bed, and become quite wakeful to say: "I will tell you all I can, my child." For Sally has thrust aside talk of the day's events, making no more of the wedding ceremony than of "Charley's Aunt," with: "_Why_ did my father and mother part? You _will_ tell me now, won't you, Major dear?"

Lying was necessary--inevitable. But he would minimise it. There was always the resource of the legal fiction; all babes born in matrimony are legally the children of their mother's husband, _quand-meme_. He must make that his sheet-anchor.

"You know, Sallykin, your father and mother fell out before you were born. And the first time I saw your mother--why, bless my soul, my dear! you were quite a growing girl--yes, able to get a staff-officer's thumb in your mouth, and bite it. Indeed, you did! It was General Pellew; they say he's going to be made a peer." The Major thinks he sees his way out of the fire by sinking catechism in reminiscences. "I can recollect it all as if it were yesterday. I said to him, 'Who's the poor pretty little mother, General?' Because he knew your mother, and I didn't. 'Don't you know?' said he. 'She's Mrs. Graythorpe.' I asked about her husband, but Pellew had known nothing except that there was a row, and they had parted." The Major's only fiction here was that he subst.i.tuted the name Graythorpe for Palliser. "Next time I saw her we picked up some acquaintance, and she asked if I was a Lincolnshire Lund, because her father always used to talk of how he went to Lund's father's, near Crowland, when he was a boy. 'Stop a bit,' said I; 'what was your father's name?' 'Paul Nightingale,' says she." Observe that nothing was untrue in this, because Rosey always spoke and thought of Paul Nightingale as her father.

"That was my grandfather?" Sally was intent on acc.u.mulating facts--would save up a.n.a.lysis till after. The Major took advantage of a slight choke over his whiskey to mix a brief nod into it; it was a lie--but, then, he himself couldn't have said which was nod and which was choke; so it hardly counted. He continued, availing himself at times of the remains of the choke to help him to slur over difficult pa.s.sages.

"He was the young brother of a sort of sweetheart of mine--a silly boyish business--a sort of calf-love. She married and died. But he was her great pet, a favourite younger brother. One keeps a recollection of this sort of thing."--The Major makes a parade of his powers of oblivion, and his failure to carry it out sits well upon him.--"Of course, my romantic memories"--the Major smiles derision of Love's young dream--"had something to do with my interest in your mother, but I hope I should have done the same if there had been no such thing.

Well, the mere fact of your father's behaviour to your mother...." He stopped short, with misgivings that his policy of talking himself out of his difficulties was not such a very safe one, after all. Here he was, getting into a fresh mess, gratuitously!

"Mamma won't talk about that," says Sally, "so I suppose I'm not to ask _you_." The Major must make a stand upon this, or the enemy will swarm over his entrenchments. Merely looking at his watch and saying it's time for us to be in bed will only bring a moment's respite. There is nothing for it but decision.

"Sally dear, your mother does not tell you because she wishes the whole thing buried and forgotten. Her wishes must be my wishes...."

He would like to stop here--to cut it short at that, at once and for good. But the pathetic anxiety of the face from which all memories of "Charley's Aunt" have utterly vanished is too much for his fort.i.tude; and, at the risk of more semi-fibs, he extenuates the sentence.

"One day your mother may tell you all about it. She is the proper person to tell it--not me. Neither do I think I know it all to tell."

"You know if there was or wasn't a divorce?" The Major feels very sorry he didn't let it alone.

"I'll tell you that, you inquisitive chick, if you'll promise on honour not to ask any more questions."

"I promise."

"Honour bright?"

"Honest Injun!"

"That's right. Now I'll tell you. There was no divorce, but there was a suit for a divorce, inst.i.tuted by him. He failed to make out a case."

Note that the expression "your father" was carefully excluded. "She was absolutely blameless--to my thinking, at least. Now that's plenty for a little girl to know. And it's high time we were both in bed and asleep."

He kisses the grave, sad young face that is yearning to hear more, but is too honourable to break its compact. "They'll be at Rheims by now,"

says he, to lighten off the conversation.

CHAPTER XVII

SALLY'S LARK. AND HOW SHE TOOK HER MEDICAL ADVISER INTO HER CONFIDENCE AFTER DIVINE SERVICE

Though Sally cried herself to sleep after her interview with her beloved but reticent old fossil, nevertheless, when she awoke next morning and found herself mistress of the house and the situation, she became suddenly alive to the advantages of complete independence. She was an optimist const.i.tutionally; for it _is_ optimism to decide that it is "rather a lark" to breakfast by yourself when you have just dried the tears you have been shedding over the loss of your morning companion. Sally came to this conclusion as she poured out her tea, after despatching his toast and coffee to the Major in his own room.

He sometimes came down to breakfast, but such a dissipation as yesterday put it out of the question on this particular morning.

The lark continued an unalloyed, unqualified lark quite to the end of the second cup of tea, when it seemed to undergo a slight clouding over--a something we should rather indicate by saying that it slowed down pa.s.sing through a station, than that it was modulated into a minor key. Of course, we are handicapped in our metaphors by an imperfect understanding of the exact force of the word "lark" used in this connexion.

The day before does not come back to us during our first cup at breakfast, whether it be tea or coffee. A happy disposition lets what we have slept on sleep, till at least it has glanced at the weather, and knows that it is going to be cooler, some rain. Then memory revives, and all the chill inheritance of overnight. We pick up the thread of our existence, and draw our finger over the last knots, and then go on where we left off. We remember that we have to see about this, and we mustn't be late at that, and that there's an order got to be made out for the stores. There wasn't in Sally's case, certainly, because it was Sunday; but there was tribulation awaiting her as soon as she could recollect her overdue a.n.a.lysis of the Major's concealed facts. She had put it off till leisure should come; and now that she was only looking at a microcosm of the garden seen through the window, and reflected upside down in the tea-urn, she had surely met with leisure. Her mind went back tentatively on the points of the old man's reminiscences, as she looked at her own thoughtful face in the convex of the urn opposite, nursed in two miniature hands whose elbows were already becoming unreasonably magnified, though really they were next to nothing nearer.

Just to think! The Major had actually been in love when he was young.

More than once he must have been, because Sally knew he was a widower.

She touched the shiny urn with her finger, to see how hideously it swelled in the mirror. You know what fun that is! But she took her finger back, because it was too hot, though off the boil.

There was a bluebottle between the blind and the window-pane, as usual; if he was the same bluebottle that was there when Fenwick was first brought into this room, he had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, like the old _regime_ in France. He only knew how to b.u.t.t and blunder resonantly at the gla.s.s; but he could do it as well as ever, and he seemed to have made up his mind to persevere. Sally listened to his monotone, and watched her image in the urn.

"I wish I hadn't promised not to ask more," she thought to herself.

"Anyhow, Tishy's wrong. n.o.body ever was named Palliser--that's flat!

And if there was a divorce-suit ever so, _I_ don't care!..." She had to stop thinking for a moment, to make terms with the cat, who otherwise would have got her claws in the beautiful white damask, and ripped.

"Besides, if my precious father behaved so badly to mamma, how could it be _her_ fault? I don't _believe_ in mother being the _least_ wrong in anything, so it's no use!" This last filled out a response to an imaginary indictment of an officious Crown-Prosecutor. "I know what I should like! I should like to get at that old Scroope, or whatever his name is, and get it all out of him. I'd give him a piece of my mind, gossipy old humbug!" It then occurred to Sally that she was being unfair. No, she wouldn't castigate old Major Roper for tattling, and at the same time cross-examine him for her own purposes. It would be underhand. But it would be very easy, if she could get at him, to make him talk about it. She rehea.r.s.ed ways and means that might be employed to that end. For instance, nothing more natural than to recur to the legend of how she bit General Pellew's finger; that would set him off!

She recited the form of speech to be employed. "Do you know, Major Roper, I'm told I once bit a staff-officer's finger off," etc. Or would it be better not to approach the matter with circ.u.mspection, but go straight to the point--"You must have met my father, Major Roper, etc.," and then follow on with explanations? Oh dear, how difficult it was to settle! If only there were any one she could trust to talk to about it! Really, Tishy was quite out of the question, even if she could take her mind off her Bradshaw for five minutes, which she couldn't.

"Of course, there's Prosy, if you come to that," was the conclusion reached at the end of a long avenue of consideration, on each side of which referees who might have been accepted, but had been rejected, were supposed to be left to their disappointment. "Only, fancy making a confidant of old Prosy! Why, he'd feel your pulse and look at your tongue, just as likely as not."

But Dr. Vereker, thus dismissed to the rejected referees, seemed not to care for their companionship, and to be able to come back. At any rate, Miss Sally ended up a long cogitation with, "I've a great mind to go and talk to Prosy about it, after all! Perhaps he would be at church."

Now, if this had been conversation instead of soliloquy, Sally's const.i.tutional frankness would have entered some protest against the a.s.sumption that she intended to go to church as a matter of course. As she was her only audience, and one that knew all about the speaker already, she slurred a little over the fact that her decision to attend church was influenced by a belief that probably Dr. Vereker would be there. If she chose, she should deceive herself, and consult n.o.body else. She looked at her watch, as the open-work clock with the punctual ratchet-movement had stopped, and was surprised to find how late she was. "Comes of weddings!" was her comment. However, she had time to wind the clock up and set it going when she came downstairs again ready for church.

St. Satisfax's Revd. Vicar prided himself on the appropriateness of his sermons; so, this time, as he had yesterday united a distinguished and beautiful widow to her second husband, he selected for his text the parable of the widow's son. True, Mrs. Nightingale had no son, and her daughter wasn't dead, and there is not a hint in the text that the widow of Nain married again, or had any intention of doing so. On the other hand, the latter had no daughter, presumably, and her son was alive. And as to marrying again, why, there was the very gist and essence of the comparison, if you chose to accept the cryptic suggestions of the Revd. Vicar, and make it for yourself. The lesson we had to learn from this parable was obviously that nowadays widows, however good and solvent, were mundane, and married again; while in the City of Nain, nineteen hundred years ago, they (being in Holy Writ) were, as it were, Sundane, and didn't. The delicacy of the reverend suggestion to this effect, without formal indictment of any offender, pa.s.ses our powers of description. So subtle was it that Sally felt she had nothing to lay hold of.

Nevertheless, when the last of the group that included herself and the doctor, and walked from St. Satisfax towards its atomic elements'

respective homes, had vanished down her turning--it was the large Miss Baker, as a matter of fact--then Sally referred to the sermon and its text, jumping straight to her own indictment of the preacher.

"Why shouldn't my mother marry again if she likes, Dr.

Vereker--especially Mr. Fenwick?"

"Don't you think it possible, Miss Sally, that the parson didn't mean anything about your mother--didn't connect her in his mind with----"

"With the real widow in the parable? Oh yes, he did, though! As if mother was a real widow!"

Now, the doctor had heard from his own widowed mother the heads of the gossip about the supposed divorce. He had pooh-poohed this as mere tattle--asked for evidence, and so on. But, having heard it, it was not to be wondered at that he put a false interpretation on Sally's last words. They seemed to acknowledge the divorce story. He felt very unsafe, and could only repeat them half interrogatively, "As if Mrs. Nightingale was a real widow?" But with the effect that Sally immediately saw clean through him, and knew what was pa.s.sing in his mind.

"Oh no, Dr. Vereker! I wasn't thinking of _that_." She faced round to disclaim it, turning her eyes full on the embarra.s.sed doctor. Then she suddenly remembered it was the very thing she had come out to talk about, and felt ashamed. The slightest possible flush, that framed up her smile and her eyes, made her at this moment a bad companion for a man who was under an obligation not to fall in love with her--for that was how the doctor thought of himself. Sally continued: "But I wish I had been, because it would have done instead."

The young man was really, at the moment, conscious of very little beyond the girl's fascination, and his reply, "Instead of what?" was a little mechanical.

"I mean instead of explaining what I wanted you to talk about special.

But when I spoke, you know, just now about a real widow, I meant a real widow that--that _wids_--you know what I mean. Don't laugh!"