Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/431

418 feet below the surface of the water. Each one of the millions was like a tiny ray of silver light darting about in the depths of the sea, and the whole display like an exhibition of fireworks at the court of King Neptune for the amusement of the Ocean Nymphs.

Amongst the passengers was Mr. Samuel Trimmer, an indigo planter, from Bengal, accompanied by his wife and two children—a boy and girl respectively—with a native bearer and nurse, or Ayah. The eldest daughter, Lucy, was now a pupil at the celebrated Boarding School and Finishing Establishment kept by the Misses Mountchauncey at Helmston, of which we already know something. The district of Bughumpore, in which Mr. Trimmer had carried on his industrial operations, had been over-run by the mutineers, and the lives of the Trimmer family had only been saved by the attachment of one or two of the native servants to Mrs. Trimmer, and in last resort by the courage and resolution of the lady herself.

Mr. S. Trimmer was not what is called a bad man, nor had he originally been deficient in that ordinary amount of physical nerve and dash which incites men to face danger boldly when they cannot help themselves. The sun of Bengal, however, had baked his original gifts out of him, and left him stranded on the quicksands of the most overwhelming indolence which ever oppressed the soul even of an Anglo-Bengalee. Poor Mrs. Trimmer’s chief difficulty at the moment when she was called upon to save her children by effecting a timely retreat into the jungle, where they might await, in comparative safety, the advance of a small British detachment—of which they had received advice—was to induce her husband to put on his socks; he could not understand what all the fuss was about. He was quite sure the mutineers would never take the trouble to come all the way to Trimmerobad for the mere pleasure of cutting their throats: it was so confoundedly hot; after dinner now, in the cool of the evening, he might be induced to entertain the question; but really it was too much to expect of a hard-worked man like him to risk a sun-stroke in the full heat of the day, just because Mrs. Trimmer was always foreseeing and foretelling calamities which never happened. Of course it was a different thing at Meerut, at Delhi, at Cawnpore, at Lucknow. Had he been in any of the places named, Mr. Trimmer would cheerfully have recognised the presence of danger: he would have loaded his revolver, mounted his war-horse, and cried “Ha, ha!” in concert with that spirited animal—there where the braying of the trumpets was the loudest. Under existing circumstances, Mr. T.’s programme was—a nap, tiffin, a nap, a light dinner, forty winks, and a cool ride into the jungle. Had this little arrangement been acted upon, another wink might have been added to the conventional estimate of forty, and that forty-first wink might have been of some duration.

Mrs. Trimmer, who was a small, pale woman, who looked as if she had been overboiled, and who under all circumstances—save her general conduct of the business and the entire control of the family arrangements—was a quiet and submissive wife enough, now got up a little mutiny on her own account, and caused her lethargic husband to be carted off into the jungle with her other belongings. She had never intended nor wished to play so imperial a part in the concerns of Trimmer & Co.; but as years passed on, the conviction was gradually forced upon her mind that the huge mass of humanity to which she had sworn respect and obedience was little better than an emphatic impostor. The wife thereupon took the reins of government into her own hands, but in a quiet and unobtrusive way, leaving outsiders to the belief that she simply took charge of minor points of detail that Mr. Trimmer’s mind might be left undisturbed to evolve those mighty commercial projects with which his brain was overwhelmed in calm and undisturbed serenity. Mrs. T. even went so far, that she persuaded her large husband that he really was a very remarkable man, but that it would be mistaken economy to waste his gifts upon the petty vexations, and hopes, and disappointments of business, when, by a single prolific thought, he might strike out fresh channels running with liquid gold, or good bills at two months’ date.

So far of the antecedents of the Trimmer family. It is better just now not to meddle too much with the Trimmer Chronicles—even with that portion of them which may be regarded as black letter, and which referred to their Indian career. Let us get back to the deck of the Asia, and there we shall find Mr. Trimmer lying upon a pile of cushions; and, arguing from the absolute repose of his body, we may suppose that his mind is grappling with a commercial combination of a more abstruse kind than usual. The two children are playing on the deck, to the immense delight of the two native servants, and Mrs. Trimmer is quietly looking on; but her thoughts are with the little girl from whom she has now been separated for six years, and whom she is now so shortly to see again.

“I wonder, Samuel, if we shall find Lucy very tall? She must now be sixteen, and that is just the age at which girls shoot up.”

Mr. Trimmer gazed at her with a lack-lustre eye. Why would she disturb his calculations?

“Eh?—hum—yes—shouldn’t wonder, Martha—growing’s nearly the only thing in the world that doesn’t give one any trouble. What a trouble talking is. I wonder when this fatiguing journey—will be over—makes me quite ill to think—of that wretched engine bumping up and down; just wrap the shawl round my feet—there’s a good woman.”

Mrs. Trimmer did so. An old wizened civilian paused in his steady pacing of the quarter-deck to speak with her. The poor little woman discharged all her duties in so unobtrusive a manner, and kept the children so well out of mischief, that she had won for herself the respect of Mr. McDunner, who was not generally an admirer of the fair sex.

“In three days, madam, at furthest, we shall be at Southampton, and” (with a sly glance at the vast meditative form of Trimmer) “you will be relieved from all the anxieties of the journey.”

Mrs. Trimmer was not the woman to hold her peace when a slight was cast upon her husband, so she quietly replied:

“I shall be glad of it, sir, for my husband’s