Andrew Lang

“ She loves us and we love her dearly. Ask Batsy,’ he said in a monotonous voice, as if he were repeating a lesson. ‘Batsy, come here,’ he said in the same voice. ‘Is Miss Limmer kind to us?’
Batsy threw up her eyes—it was like a stage effect, ‘We love Miss Limmer dearly, and she loves us. She is very, very kind to us, like our dear mamma.’ Her voice was monotonous too. ‘I never can say the last part,’ said Tommy. ‘Batsy knows it; about dear mamma.’
‘Indeed!’ said Merton. ‘Tommy, why did you come here?’
‘I don’t know. I told you that None-so-pretty told us to. ”

“ These innocent conversations ended, and, after dinner, the company walked about or sat beneath the stars in the fragrant evening air, the Earl seated by Miss Willoughby, Scremerston smoking with Logan; while the white dress of Lady Alice flitted ghost-like on the lawn, and the tip of the Prince’s cigar burned red in the neighbourhood. In the drawing-room Lady Mary was tentatively conversing with the Jesuit, that mild but probably dangerous animal. She had the curiosity which pious maiden ladies feel about the member of a community which they only know through novels. ”

“ Afterwards, fearing to hurt the religious sentiments of the Highland servants by playing ping-pong on Sunday in the hall, she instructed him elsewhere, and clandestinely, in that pastime till the hour of tea arrived.
Merton did not appear at the tea-table. Tired of this Castle of Indolence, loathing Blake, afraid of more talk with Lady Bude, eating his own heart, he had started alone after luncheon for a long walk round the loch. The day had darkened, and was deadly still; the water was like a mirror of leaden hue; the air heavy and sulphurous. ”

“ The Earl of Bude had meant to lay his heart, coronet, and other possessions, real and personal, before the tiny feet of the fair American at Goodwood. But when he learned from Merton the involvements of this heiress and paragon, that her hand depended on the choice of the people, that the choice of the people was to settle on the adventurer who brought to New York the rarest of nature’s varieties, the earl honourably held his peace. ”

“ Lady Mary never had tried, but the idea was new to her, and she would make the experiment in winter.
‘Deer skins, stroked, do sparkle,’ said Logan, ‘I read that in a book. I daresay horses do, only nobody tries. I don’t think electricity is the explanation of why some people can’t bear cats.’
‘Electricity is the modern explanation of everything—love, faith, everything,’ remarked the Jesuit; ‘but, as I said, who shall explain electricity?’
Lady Mary, recognising the orthodoxy of these sentiments, felt more friendly towards Father Riccoboni. He might be a Jesuit, but he was bien pensant. ”

“ Now (as may have been observed) her style was of that polished character which can only be heard to perfection in circles socially elevated and intellectually cultured—‘in that Garden of the Souls’—to quote Tennyson.
The spot where Merton and Lady Bude were seated was beautiful indeed. They reclined on the short sea grass above a shore where long tresses of saffron-hued seaweed clothed the boulders, and the bright sea pinks blossomed. On their right the Skrae, now clearer than amber, mingled its waters with the sea loch. ”

“ Merton was reading the newspaper in the office, expecting a client. Miss Blossom was typewriting in the inner chamber; the door between was open. The office boy knocked at Merton’s outer door, and the sound of that boy’s strangled chuckling was distinctly audible to his employer. There is something irritating in the foolish merriment of a youthful menial. No conduct could be more likely than that of the office boy to irritate the first client, arriving on business of which it were hard to exaggerate the delicate and anxious nature. ”

“ Well, yesterday Blake was sneering at the whole affair.’
‘What is this wireless machine? Explain it to me,’ said Lady Bude.
‘How can you be so cruel?’ asked Merton.
‘Why cruel?’
‘Oh, you know very well how your sex receives explanations. You have three ways of doing it.’
‘Explain them!’
‘Well, the first way is, if a man tries to explain what “per cent” means, or the difference of “odds on,” or “odds against,” that is, if they don’t gamble, they cast their hands desperately abroad, and cry, “Oh, don’t, I never can understand!” ”

“ A young lady, Miss Maskelyne, an amber-hued beauty, who practically lived as a female jester at the houses of the great, shone resplendent, indeed, but magnificence of apparel was demanded by her profession.
‘I am so tired of it,’ she said to Merton. ‘Fancy being more and more anxious for country house invitations. Fancy an artist’s feelings, when she knows she has not been a success. And then when the woman of the house detests you! She often does. ”

“ The secret of the Emu’s feathers involved the father of Lady Fastcastle, of his old friend’s wife, in a very distasteful way. Logan, since his marriage, had never shown any curiosity in the matter. His was a joyous nature; no one was less of a self-tormentor.
‘Well, old fellow,’ said Merton, ‘keep your dragon, and I’ll keep my Emu.’
‘I won’t keep him long, I assure you,’ said Logan. ‘Only for a day or two, I dare say; then you’ll know; sooner perhaps. But, for excellent reasons, I asked Bude and Lady Bude to say nothing about the hallucination of these second-sighted Highland fishers. ”

“ I used to be fond of it, but age,’ sighed the Earl, ‘and fear of rheumatism have separated the bustard and me.’
‘I should like to try it very much,’ said Logan. ‘I often fished Tweed and Whitadder, at night, when I was a boy, but we used a small dark fly.’
‘You must be very careful if you fish at night here,’ said Lady Mary. ‘It is so dark in the valley under the woods, and the Coquet is so dangerous. The flat sandstone ledges are like the floor of a room, and then a step may land you in water ten feet deep, flowing in a narrow channel. I am always anxious when anyone fishes here at night. ”

“ She sought him in what she, at least, regarded as the interests of her eldest daughter, an heiress under the will of a maternal uncle. Merton had met the young lady, who looked like a portrait of her mother in youth. He knew that Miss Malory, now ‘wrapped up in’ her betrothed lover, would, in a few years, be equally absorbed in ‘her boys.’ She was pretty, blonde, dull, good, and cast by Providence for the part of one of the best of mothers, and the despair of what man soever happened to sit next her at a dinner party. ”

“ Don’t you see how safe it is? None but the lover shall have his and her fate in his hands. C’est à prendre ou à laisser.’
Merton was young and adventurous.
‘You give me your word that your idea is absolutely safe and harmless? It involves no crime?’
‘None; and if you like,’ said Miss Martin, ‘I will bring you the highest professional opinion,’ and she mentioned an eminent name in the craft of healing. ‘He was our doctor when we were children,’ said the lady, ‘and we have always been friends.’
‘Well,’ Merton said, ‘what is good enough for Sir Josiah Wilkinson is good enough for me. ”

“ Macrae sharply. ‘A reef?’
‘In my opinion,’ said the captain, ‘the beggars in the submarine have torpedoed us. Attached torpedoes to our keel, sir,’ he explained, respectfully touching his cap and shifting the quid in his cheek. He was a bluff tar of the good old school.
‘Merciful heavens!’ exclaimed Mr. Macrae, his face paling. ‘What can this new outrage mean? Here on our deck is the gold; if they explode their torpedoes the bullion sinks to join the exhaustless treasures of the main!’
‘A bit of bluff and blackmail on their part I fancy,’ said Bude, lighting a cigarette. ”

“ The millionaire, Merton felt, was worthy to be his daughter’s father.
‘The power of money!’ mused Mr. Macrae; ‘what is it in circumstances like mine? Surrounded by all the resources of science, I am baffled by a clever rogue and in a civilised country the aid of the law and the police is as remote and inaccessible as in the Great Sahara! But to business!’
He sent for Benson, bade him, with some gillies, carry the prisoner into the dungeon of the old castle, loose his bonds, place food before him, and leave him in charge of the stalker. ”

“ Shaking Bude, he offered him the beaker; the earl drained it at a draught. He shuddered, but rose to his feet.
‘Not a man alive on that doomed vessel,’ he was saying, when anew the still air was rent by the raucous notes of a megalophone:
‘Is your exhibit all right?’
‘Fit as a fiddle,’ answered Logan through a similar instrument.
‘Our exhibits are gone bust,’ answered Captain Noah Funkal. ‘Our professors are in fits. Our darkeys are all dead. Can your skipper come aboard?’
‘Just launching a boat,’ cried Logan. ”

“ But the urbanity and patience of Merton, with the high and unblemished reputation of his Association, consoled her. ‘We must yield where we innocently may,’ she assured herself, ‘to the changes of the times. Lest one good order’ (and ah, how good the Early Victorian order had been!) ‘should corrupt the world.’ Mrs. Malory knew that line of poetry. Then she remembered that Mrs. Brown-Smith was on the list of Merton’s references, and that reassured her, more or less.
As for Merton, he evolved a plan in his mind, and consulted Bradshaw’s invaluable Railway Guide. ”

“ Merton, you are a trifle my senior, and you know the world much better. I have lived in a writing and painting set, where we talked nonsense till it went to our heads, and we half believed it. And, to tell you the truth, the presence of women always sets me off. I am a humbug; I do not know Gaelic, but I mean to work away at my drama for all that. This kind of shock against the realities of life sobers a fellow.’
Blake spoke simply, in an unaffected, manly way. ”

“ How small the world is, how brief are the ages! Our ancestors, Mr. Logan, were very intimate long ago.’
‘Indeed?’ said Logan.
‘Yes. I would not speak of it to everybody; in fact, I have spoken of it to no one; but recently, examining some documents in my muniment-room, I made a discovery as interesting to me as it must be to you. Our ancestors three hundred years ago—in 1600, to be exact—were fellow conspirators.’
‘Ah, the old Gowrie game, to capture the King?’ asked Logan, who had once kidnapped a cat. ”

“ Merton seemed likely to drop into autobiography.
‘I know,’ said Logan admonishingly.
‘Well, hanged if I could take it, and she—she could not stand it either, and both of us—’
‘Do not be elegiac,’ interrupted Logan. ‘I know. Still, I am rather sorry for people’s people. The unruly affections simply poison the lives of parents and guardians, aye, and of the children too. The aged are now so hasty and imprudent. ”

“ He was sorry: he had never liked or trusted Jephson.
‘It is a subject sure to create a sensation, isn’t it?’ asked Miss Willoughby, a little paler than before.
‘It might get a man a professorship,’ said Merton.
‘There are so many of us, of them, I mean,’ said Miss Willoughby, and Merton gave a small sigh. ‘Not much larkiness here,’ he thought, and asked a transient waiter for champagne.
Miss Willoughby drank a little of the wine: the colour came into her face.
‘By Jove, she’s awfully handsome,’ thought Merton. ”

“ They do not break their hearts when disappointed. But Julia replies that for her to act as you and I would advise might be to shatter the young clergymen’s ideals.’
‘To shatter the ideals of three young men in holy orders!’ said Merton.
‘Yes, for Julia is their ideal—Julia and Duty,’ said Miss Crofton, as if she were naming a firm. ‘She lives only,’ here Julia twisted the hand of Miss Crofton, ‘she lives only to do good. ”

“ Macrae followed Merton into the billiard-room.
‘My dear sir,’ said the pallid Merton, ‘Logan and I have made a terrible blunder! We never doubted that, if we caught any one, our captive would be Blake. I do not deny that this man is his accomplice, but we have literally no proof. He may persist, if taken before a magistrate, that he is Gianesi. He may say that, being in your employment as an electrician, he naturally entered the smoking-room when the electric bell rang. He can easily account for his possession of a revolver, in a place where a mysterious crime has just been committed. ”

“ Logan,’ said the Earl, ‘I am not a man of to-day. The cupidity of our age, the eagerness with which wealthy aliens are welcomed into our best houses and families, is to me, I may say, distasteful. Better that our coronets were dimmed than that they should be gilded with the gold eagles of Chicago or blazing with the diamonds of Kimberley. ”

“ Logan, Hogs’ Bristles and Lard. And a Straddle!’
‘Lucky devil, Scremerston,’ thought Logan, for Scremerston was the only son of Lord Embleton, and he, as it seemed, had secured that coveted prize of the youth of England, the heart of the opulent Miss Bangs. But Logan only sighed and stared at the wall as one who hears of an irremediable disaster.
‘If they really were betrothed,’ said Lord Embleton, ‘I would have nothing to say or do in the way of terminating the connection, however unwelcome. A man’s word is his word. ”