Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/620

 612 and good fortune which should have been eked out through his whole existence, must be exhausted to distil that drop of concentrated bliss. The prospect of such a joy being reserved for me would have made me miserable lest some accident should rob me of so great happiness; would have caused me to take up wearing flannel waistcoats; to forswear mushrooms; to sell my guns; to shave with a Plantagenet guard on the razor; to eschew travelling by railway; to go miles round rather than pass under a ladder; to relinquish bathing. And here was an affected, insolent puppy, with nothing but a rather pretty face and a certain social position to recommend him, treating the matter in an off-hand way, as if he was conferring a favour. The conceited idiot spoke of sacrificing,—I beg pardon—sacwificing himself!

And so Alice had forgotten all about the young Engineer officer whom she was so thick with two years ago, when staying with her aunt, at Ivybridge. Well, well, so much the better, perhaps, for her father would have never consented to the match. Still it was a bad bit of news to have to tell Frank on his return to England, and I should not have expected her, from all I had seen, to fall in so readily with her father’s views respecting Harold Ormond.

I found that sleek aristocrat at the station next morning, looking just as calm and neat as if he had not been disturbed at so unusual an hour, and became immediately absorbed in the problem which he presents to me whenever I meet him, viz., how on earth he manages to tie that peculiarly elegant knot in his scarf. I had plenty of time for the consideration of this point during the journey, for after a short discussion on the state of the odds, he sank into a gentle slumber, which was only broken once when his servant came to the window and aroused him at a junction available for sherry.

There was a station within a mile of Morion Parvus, the railway having passed through a portion of my uncle’s estate, much to his lamentation and wrath. To this day he considers himself as having been irreparably injured by the innovation, though there are people who would not mind how much of that sort of injustice was done them. For when I say that the railway passed through the estate, I speak advisedly, as it tunnelled under a hill at its extreme northern boundary, and did not injure a rood of land, grass or arable; and for this innocuous trespass my uncle received ten thousand pounds; besides which some house property belonging to him in the neighbourhood was, by the improved communication with the nearest town, quadrupled in value. But then my uncle disapproved of railways, and the penny postage, and geology and free trade, and all those sort of things on principle, and thought so little of the benefit his pocket had received, that he never even mentioned it when detailing his grievances to a stranger.

But we, whose ideas were more modern, and whose hands and feet were half frozen, were glad as we gave up our tickets that we had not far to go to a bright fire, a good dinner, and the warm reception given us by my uncle, an elderly, goodnatured, strong-bodied, morbidly proud country gentleman; proud of his ancestors, proud of his position in the country, and, above all, proud of a reversion he had in a Banshee.

I do not know how it is, perhaps we Morions are of Irish extraction, for I believe the Banshee to be a Paddy; but, however that may be, our fortunes are mysteriously bound up with those of a black cat. Whenever any calamity is about to happen to the head of the family, pussy is sure to make her appearance with dilated eyes and electric tail.

Now one winter’s night, when my uncle was a lad of eleven years old and home for the holidays, he was reading the “Castle of Otranto” in the dining-room, and having finished the first volume, lit a candle and proceeded with a silent, cautious step (his father lying ill at the time, and the house being kept very quiet) to the study for the second. On turning from the book-case he fancied that he saw the curtain which festooned over the window move, and when, to put an end to the dread which came over him, he advanced towards it, a black cat flew out at him, dashed through the open door and disappeared. My grandfather died that night, and this confirmation of the family legend impressed my uncle with a taste for the supernatural, which has clung to him through life. My aunt was a moral chamelion, coloured by her husband, and sharing all his tastes, opinions, prejudices, and beliefs. They both spoilt their only child, and would have given her gold to eat, had her stomach demanded such Spanish liquorice; would have starved for her, died for her, done anything but consent to her marriage with B., while she had a chance of getting A. the better match. Absurd? Inconsistent? Very true: but then everybody, except the reader and the writer, is mad upon some point; and that was the weak spot in their brains.

My uncle met us at the door.

“Glad to see you, Ormond; how are you, Tom? Come in out of the cold,” said he, hurrying my travelling companion through the hall into a little room where hats, coats, &c., were kept, and then falling back and shaking my hand over again, checking me for a moment from following, while he whispered in my ear—

“Are you a medium?”

“Not that I know of,” I replied, rather puzzled.

“Is he?” nodding towards the door.

“He has plenty of the circulating medium, if you mean that,” I rejoined, making a snap shot.

“Ho, ho, Tom; far-fetched that, far-fetched! But it is not a subject to joke about,” he added, shaking his head.

It seemed that I had been witty without knowing it, so I grinned a little, and wondered whether my revered relative had been taking any refreshment before dinner.

“Now I have got wid of my waps,” said Ormond, when we had taken off our great coats, ‘I“I [sic] am weady to pay my wespects to the ladies.”

“Got rid of your raps!” cried my uncle, eagerly. “Oh, but you need not do that! This way.” And we were ushered into the drawing-room.

My aunt gave Ormond a reception which was an acted charade very easy to guess. She did not