Jilted! Or, My Uncle's Scheme, Volume 2

Creepmouse. “In love a young man should climb--not stoop. Yes, sir, to a young man like Tom, marriage should be a ladder, not a pit.”

Retired from Business.

My uncle Dick amply vindicated his brother’s eulogium of his conversational powers. When, at the bank, I had beheld the stout, big form of my relative, and heard his bluff and highly familiar language, I believed him to be as nearly related to a boor as any man of his size and age can be. But my opinion of him underwent a very remarkable change when I listened to and watched him as he sat and talked at his brother’s dinner-table. His manner then was perfectly polite; positively there were certain points in his behaviour which my father might have beheld with envy and admiration. Added to this, he was exceedingly well read; talked French with a good accent, and quoted Latin with a happy applicability that robbed its employment of all flavour of pedantry.

I had nothing to say. I was eclipsed. His jokes kept us all in high spirits. His anecdotes (which I can appreciate better now than I could then) were uniformly excellent. He appeared to know everybody; spoke with a kind of dignified familiarity of noblemen of reputation, of famous actors, of celebrated authors. He had supped with Lamb and Elliston. He had been in Haydon’s studio when Scott had called; he had advised Southey on the purchase of some stocks; he had dined with Rogers, where he had met Sydney Smith, William Bankes, Luttrell, and many others, whose names I forget.

I am very much afraid, however, that we none of us listened to him with the interest he deserved. Speaking for myself, it would have given me more pleasure to have heard an account of a champion billiard-match or a boat-race, than the best of Talleyrand’s mots, or the smartest of Sydney Smith’s rejoinders. My aunt smiled occasionally, as much out of politeness as out of appreciation; and uncle Tom grew so soon tired of these stories--which I daresay he had often heard before--that he contrived to bring the conversation round to the Stock Exchange, the income tax, and the stamp duties, on which his brother talked as freely and sagaciously as if these matters had been his only studies all his life.

However, don’t suppose that I sat like a mute through that dinner. When my uncle addressed me I contrived to answer him in a style that, I had no doubt, maintained my credit with my aunt. One reply of mine--I forget what it was, and I am very glad I do--made the old gentleman burst into a tremendous roar of laughter, and from that moment he took a great deal of notice of me, encouraged my small attempts to exhibit my parts and wit, and took wine with me, nodding his head with a cordial smile, and crying out, before he put the glass to his lips, how he wished the major made one of us.

After my aunt and Conny had left the room, we three gentlemen grew really affectionate. The two brothers shook hands several times with each other, and several times with me, from no other reason whatever, than an overflowing impulse. Old days were recalled and old scenes re-enacted. While my uncle Dick fished one beaming recollection after another out of the grey tide of the past, my uncle Tom was watching him eagerly to observe when he stopped, in order to top the reminiscence with another. Some characteristic anecdotes of my father were repeated and roared over. Then my uncle Dick, having laughed himself grave, grew sentimental, spoke with hazy eyes of his dead wife, of his pet Teazer, who was dear to him as his right hand, as the apple of his eye; of departed friends, whose wit had often cheered, whose kindness had often soothed him. Never an ill word for dead or living fell from him.

A bright scene! a happy evening! a pleasant and gracious memory--when the world was younger with him who writes this--of cordiality and good will, of brotherly love as fresh and childlike still as ever it was in the old nursery days! Shall we believe, Eugenio, all that the cynics tell us? Do relations so universally hate one another as these gentlemen make out they do? You have told me of aunts who have been as faithful in the love of their dead sisters’ offspring as ever their mothers were; I have told you of brothers whose self sacrifices for one another would fill a volume with tales of deeper interest than could even be found in narratives of the most awful murders, or in minute accounts of the most unblushing bigamies. Should a cynic expectorate after tasting a glass of Madeira, would you accept his spittle as a sample of the wine he has drunk? Neither should you regard the instances he relates to you of family feuds as typical of the actual feelings that bind relations one to another.

“And now, my boy,” said uncle Dick to me, “when are you coming to Thistlewood?”

“Name a day convenient to yourself,” I replied, “and then uncle Tom will perhaps give us his sense of the matter.”

“Never mind the bank,” exclaimed uncle Tom, “go whenever you like, and stop as long as you like.”

“I shall return from London on Thursday,” said uncle Dick, “and, if you’ll come to me on that day, say so, and I’ll send a telegram to Teazer to-morrow, to have a bed-room prepared for you.”

“Let me say Monday,” I answered. “That will give your daughter more time.”

“Very well. Tom will give you full directions as to the how and the where?” And this being settled, we got talking of other things.

I grew tired at last of sitting, and wanting to join Conny, hinted that my aunt might think us rather selfish, if we lingered much longer over our cigars.

“That’s true,” said uncle Tom, “so you go and join the ladies, and tell my wife, Dick and I will follow presently.”

Conny was reading a novel. My aunt knitted.

“What’s the name of your book?” I asked, going up to my cousin, and sitting down near her.

“‘Love and Sorrow,’” answered she. “They sent it this afternoon from the library. It is very interesting.”

I took up volume the second, and opening it, caught sight of a passage which I read aloud: “Their eyes met. In her’s was pride struggling with womanly desire. In his were blazing those wild passions which were the fruit of long years of agony and disappointment. ‘By heavens!’ he cried hoarsely, while the veins stood out upon his forehead, black and knotted, ‘I would rather take you by the throat and cast you dead at my feet, than see you Lord Algernon’s wife. Never,’ he hissed, ‘shall that virgin brow be defaced by a coronet; never shall that pure form be polluted by--by--,’ he paused, staggered, looked wildly round him, brushed off the salt dews that passion had distilled upon his broad and beautiful forehead with the back of his hand, and, uttering a low moan, fell prone upon the carpet. ‘I have killed him!’ poor Madeline shrieked, rushing to his side and raising his head and gazing with wild and piteous eyes upon the white lips and the convulsed cheeks. At that moment the door opened, and Lord Algernon entered.”

“What a queer story!” exclaimed my aunt, who was nevertheless growing interested.

“It is beautifully written in parts,” said Conny.

“Are these your pencil-marks?” I asked, taking the volume from her lap.

“Yes.”

“Here is ‘beautiful!!!’ with three points of exclamation. ‘The silent stream that runs smoothly past us, checked in its course becomes a raging torrent.’ Very true. Here is a passage doubly underscored: ‘It is easy to love a woman, but difficult to find a woman worth loving.’”

“Oh, never mind those marks,” exclaimed Conny.

“Is the hero often afflicted with salt dews?” I inquired.

“You are laughing at me.” She snatched the book from my hand, and pouted.

“I don’t often read novels,” said I, “but when I do, I must say I like a good gory story--something dripping or dank--with a yellow-haired heroine who loves to sit on her lover’s grave and braid her tresses by the light of the moon, and an Italian rival who stabs everybody in the forehead. If my hair doesn’t rise twice at least in every ten pages, I consider the author a muff. Domestic stories I hate. There is no need to subscribe to a library to hear people ask each other if they prefer brown bread to white, and muffins to crumpets, and to watch a curate take a flute in pieces out of his pocket and blow ‘Ye banks and braes’ to the pensive, flat-chested lady who works him slippers, and puts four lumps of sugar into his tea. Give me, I say, wounds and starting eye-balls, matted hair and clandestine meetings, streams of blood and gurgling yells. I don’t object to noblemen, but I think that money-lenders make the best villains. I also require that the heroine be supple and lightsome, and lissom and loose, with a tread like a panther, and a spring like--like----”

“A flea,” suggested my aunt.

“What a time you men always are over your wine,” said Conny. “What do you talk about?”

“I have received an invitation.”

“What! to Thistlewood?” asked my aunt.

“Yes, where I shall no doubt be shot.”

“Through the heart,” warbled Conny, with a sly laugh.

“Teazer, I am told, pulls a deadly trigger,” said I, looking at Conny.

“When do you go?” inquired my aunt.

“On Monday.”

“They seem in a great hurry to have you,” with a toss of the head.

“The invitation was hearty and irresistible. Yet I am so perfectly happy at Grove End, that I have no wish to leave it even for a day.”