Alfred Pretor

“ He was now a handsome young fellow, living quietly and sedately with his uncle at Broadwater; not easy to recognise as the lad who had discomfited an itinerant preacher, and played the stable-boy on the race-course at Bayview. But the spirit of Bohemianism dies hard, and I was possessed with the idea that, even in the act of “placing himself” for life, Ronald would make opportunity for a final fling. He was having a really bad time of it with his uncle, and, in spite of occasional outbursts, when the Viking blood got the better of him, had been fairly amenable to discipline. ”

“ I pray that I may never stand face to face with cholera again. Overhead, a sky like brass, and, veiling the town, a dusky, steel-blue haze, almost as palpable as gauze: the distinctive colour (I’ve been told) of a cholera atmosphere. They died like flies, crowded in their close, evil-smelling dwellings, though we lighted fires in the streets to clear the air; an idea I borrowed, I believe, from ‘Old St. Paul’s.’
“Late one evening I hurried from a sick room to get a breath of air in the theatre below. My friend, the old priest, was there before me. ”

“ Nature creates not many such. Happy the man who has known and honoured one.
Over and over again I have tried to unravel the secret of her inexplicable charm. Seating myself in some sequestered nook, where Ronald himself would find it hard to discover me, it has been my pleasure, through a long evening’s entertainment, to watch her in every graceful word and greeting that she exchanged with her friends. It was a satisfaction even to see her walk across the room—a lost art (they tell us) in these hurried and inartistic days. ”

“ So soon as one predominant idea has passed from the brain, its place must be occupied by another, for good or else for evil. Which of the two it may be, seems almost a matter of indifference; it is the law, so to speak, of their being that it should be indifferent.
I almost wished in those days that I could fall ill myself. Five or six months of nursing under Bindo’s hand would have been a lazy delight to me, and (selfish as it may seem) better far for him than the life he was leading. ”

“ The next day a ragged little hound, called “Judy,” was selected from the kennels at Thorpe Hill, and despatched to the protégé in question. Pure white she was, and so small, that, at a shift, you could hold her in the hollow of your hand. A veritable little mongrel, of course, if ever there was one. Indeed, nothing but a mongrel would have had the capacity for so delicate a mission. For, as we all know, it is to the mongrel that we look for intelligence and originality. The consciousness of inherited merit is fatal to intellectual progress in an animal of pedigree. ”

“ Judy often came on a visit to Thorpe Hill, where she regularly spent an hour after dinner in digging at the root of a favourite beech tree, with the energy of a dog that is close on a prize. From which I inferred that she was a truffle-terrier in disguise, who would make all our fortunes, and set Matthew to dig in her place till he blasphemed against Judy and the truffles and me. But Matthew didn’t put his heart into his work, or realise the fact that Judy’s credit was at stake. ”

“ It is the scare and shadow of war that is the curse without the blessing.
Thorne, as a minute in his company would prove to you, is a hard-headed journalist; witty, and an excellent talker; facile, of course, with his pen, and ready to turn out a new theology as easily as he could write an article on the last discovered butterfly or grub.
Andrews is a graduate of London University, spending with Eastonville the remnant of a holiday. Fairly humorous and incorrigibly deaf—never more so (his friends say) than when a subject bores him—he is himself a trifle of a bore to-night. ”

“ Even if it had pierced its way through wind and rain, those whom it summoned could only have watched and waited for one of those strange freaks by which the sea now and again elects to spare a human life. ”

“ Human nature was (or so it seems to one) so much kindlier then than now. What pleasant ghosts are raised by these old letters; what touches that one missed in them in the hurried, feverish days when they were written! In so very many cases, too, the hands that penned them are still. I have come upon one from Ronald, written when he was just twenty-five. It is singularly devoid of romance, compared with many of the others, and has “brisked me up” considerably, when I was verging on melancholia.
“Dear Fred (it runs) ,
“I shall want you for a wedding a month hence. ”

“ Lashed into foam, and its voice drowned by the wind, it parts with much of its majesty, and becomes merely a symbol of turmoil and unrest. What it gains in wildness, it loses in self-control, like the seething rapids of Niagara before they compose themselves into dignity prior to the final plunge. ”

“ Judy repudiated in toto her maternal parentage, and reproduced all the best characteristics of her father, combined with a brilliant intelligence, and a far wider appreciation of the sympathies of life. Her minor peculiarities were borrowed from those of a cat. She sat like a cat, pounced like a cat, and washed her face like a cat, using either or both of her paws with a truly feline indifference. She could climb bushes, too, hanging on by her teeth, to the detriment of any unwary fledgling who presumed over confidently upon the limitation of natural gifts. ”

“ Only a mile from Broadwater, in the white house that nestles in the heart of the valley, just visible to us over a depression in the lulls, lived a young widow of twenty-eight—Ronald’s dearest friend, and his comforter and consoler whenever the monotony of existence seemed almost intolerable to the lad just entering on manhood.
The coalition between Ronald and Mrs. Thorpe was regarded with extreme disfavour by the uncle. “Making a milksop of the lad,” he called it sneeringly. But the villagers, one and all of them, were emphatic in their praise. ”

“ I felt, indeed, as must that Bishop, who, to oblige a small girl younger in years than in experience, condescended to ring at a street door, and was rewarded with the advice, “Run! run for yer life! they’ll knock the ’ead off yer shoulders if they catches ye.” I wonder what he elected to do? pocket his dignity and run? or rely upon his clerical attire to see him through? In any case our anxiety would be more protracted. What if the escapade should reach our uncle’s ears? ”

“ She was the last person ever to think of self. Still it does look unfeeling to go to her straight from all this light and merriment. Yet I feel it less than most would. Life and death seem to me so closely mixed, that wherever one is there you may expect the other. ”

“ Wiser people than ourselves kept quietly indoors; and the sand, the sea, the gulls, and the hurrying scud could all have been rendered in varying shades of grey. It is, to me, the most fascinating hue that the changeful sea can wear. One great artist, whose sketches are the glory of Girton College, knew it well. p. 134With an unerring eye for this sad unity of tone, she admits no faintest touch of colour into her cold grey wastes of sea and sky.
It was a risky and foolhardy attempt on the part of Ronald, and one that he has bitterly repented of, to launch a boat that afternoon. ”

“ But, if fate was against him, and the wind light, and the cigar drew slowly, he had no false shame in appearing on the chancel steps to announce with all the dignity of a formal notice that the last two verses of the hymn would be repeated. After which he disappeared into the churchyard again.
The sermon was to me, as a boy, full of the most delightful interest. It had an infinity of anticipation. No one knew what was coming—least of all the Rector himself. We felt stimulated by the chance of any and every possibility. ”

“ Your aunt got up first and then called your uncle. And there, full in the moonlight, stood that identical carriage, and the coachman was a skellington—dressed in black and weepers, for all the world like an undertaker at a funeral. He turned his eyes—or what should have been his eyes—full upon them both. And then your aunt went faint, and I believe your uncle did no better. Anyhow, when they came back to their senses, carriage and coachman were gone.”
“And what did it mean, Frampton?”
“Well, that’s more than I can tell you, Master Ronald. It’s fairly puzzled all of us. ”

“ Spending little upon himself, he had always a band of pensioners who were dependent on him for assistance. So it was through them that he could most surely be reached. “Seething the kid in the mother’s milk,” as we are told in ‘Kenilworth,’ is an occupation that offers a wide field to the ingenuity of the inventive.
“Two’s company and three’s none,” muttered Ronald, when, on entering a room suddenly, he found an animated conversation drop suddenly into silence, while an echo of his own escapades and iniquities lingered in the air. ”

“ Just when we want you most, your voice will be gone, and you’ll have spoiled us for all other singing, precisely as the great Sarah has spoiled us for any acting but her own. If we could only forget and start fresh with each week, how nice and pleasant everything would be. I believe Nelly is right in ‘Cometh up,’ when she says that memory is often a cruel gift. No one would choose to remember a feeble show, or to spoil his enjoyment of average singing by a recollection of the best. ”

“ Yet, think what it means for a boy of sixteen, without discipline or experience to steady him, to drop, literally in a moment, from notoriety to neglect, activity to stagnation; almost from life to death. ”

“ Anyhow, you didn’t come all this way so early in the morning to treat me to a revised version of Bunyan’s allegory. What’s the matter, Ronald?”
“I believe the old man’s jealous of me. He says I’m over here too often—that people are beginning to talk, and all manner of rot. I’m almost sure he wants to marry you himself.”
“My dear boy, you’re dreaming. Do you think that I would abandon my independence, and all my advanced theories on women, to adopt your uncle’s musty, antediluvian ideas? ”

“ A fair boy, delicate looking, but with lungs that can fill the biggest concert room in London, with wavy golden hair flung back on his forehead, and the long dreamy eyes so dear to the soul of Raphael. ”

“ Ronald’s face was a study. “Ridden in it? actually ridden in that coach? And did you, Sir, did you see the devil?” he continued anxiously. “Frampton says he always drives it.”
“Not exactly, Ronald. And, by the way, my lad, I wouldn’t, if I were you, introduce his name quite so familiarly into your conversation. Frampton must be cautioned, Fred, as to what he tells the boy.”
“Well, he didn’t exactly say that, Sir,” continued Ronald, willing to justify his friend. “He called him old Nick.”
“That’s a trifle better. ”

“ In fact, it was Raphael’s picture of Bindo Altoviti (long p. 161supposed to be a portrait of the painter) that had won him his name. Framed in the cabin window of a Bournemouth steamer (excursion boats in these days do not condescend to port holes) , his arms resting on the sill, the resemblance had struck me irresistibly. From that day he became “Bindo” to all of us, and would scarcely have recognised an appeal to him as “Eric,” if we had lighted on the name by accident. His hair perhaps was one of his most telling points. ”

“ Judy taught her master many things: among them how to win the love of her community. Jealousy, it seems, is the family failing. It is idle, she told him, to imagine that a few scraps of half-hearted affection can claim the devotion of a life. Careless, casual attentions may gratify an unexacting dog; p. 111they can never win his heart’s love. It is not for pity’s sake, as some will tell you, that the mongrel of the streets is attracted by preference to the vagabond and outcast, who is as lonely as himself ”

“ Your practical and steady-going individual—the one, for example, who can “see nothing” in Alice in Wonderland—never admits into his reckoning the influence of excitement. It disturbs and disarranges his equilibrium of life. ”

“ Times upon times, in similar gales, we had been hurried to the beach by signals of distress, and had helped the Coastguard, sometimes in saving life, oftener in furthering that painful recall to life which is more agonizing to witness than death itself. ”