Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/373

29, 1860.]

, if you have done me the favour to read it aright, has been a chronicle of desperate heroism on the part of almost all the principal personages represented. But not the Countess de Saldar, scaling the embattled fortress of Society; or Rose, tossing its keys to her lover from the shining turret-tops; or Evan, keeping bright the lamp of self-respect in his bosom against south wind and east; or Mr. John Raikes, consenting to a plate of tin that his merits and honours may be the better propagated, the more surely acknowledged; none excel friend Andrew Cogglesby, who, having fallen into Old Tom’s plot to humiliate his wife and her sisters, simply for Evan’s sake, and without any distinct notion of the terror, confusion, and universal upset he was bringing on his home, could yet, after a scared contemplation of the scene when he returned from his expedition to Fallowfield, continue to wear his rueful mask; could yet persevere in treacherously outraging his lofty wife, though the dread of possible consequences went far to knock him down sixty times an hour, could yet (we must have a climax) maintain his naughty false bankrupt cheerfulness to that injured lady behind the garrulous curtains!

He did it to vindicate the ties of blood against accidents of position. Was he justified? I am sufficiently wise to ask my own sex alone.

On the other side, be it said (since in our modern days every hero must have his weak heel), that now he had gone this distance it was difficult to recede. It would be no laughing matter to tell his solemn Harriet that he had been playing her a little practical joke. His temptations to give it up were incessant and most agitating; but if to advance seemed terrific, there was, in stopping short, an awfulness so overwhelming that Andrew abandoned himself to the current, his real dismay adding to his acting powers.

The worst was, that the joke was no longer his: it was Old Tom’s. He discovered that he was in Old Tom’s hands completely. Andrew had thought that he would just frighten the women a bit, get them down to Lymport for a week or so, and then announce that matters were not so bad with the Brewery as he had feared; concluding the farce with a few domestic fireworks. Conceive his