Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/624

616 our heads when we stood on our hind legs, but never alighted. So that those of our children, who could stand on their hind legs best, got most swallows, while those who could not do it at all died of starvation. Thus a race of cats arose walking on their hind legs. Then the fore paws being entirely used for catching the swallows, after a few generations turned to hands, and so the cats eventually became monkeys, the transition from which animal to the Morion family is obvious.”

“I don’t see it!” murmured my uncle.

“The monkeys,” the table rapped on, “migrated to a country where they were fed upon by a tribe of wolves, who, as they sprang into the trees, caught them by the tail, and so, those monkeys with the shortest tails having the best chance of life, a species was formed without any tails at all. Various accidents and necessities caused after-generations to grow tall and bare, and taught them to talk and cook, and you are the present specimen. I always take an interest in my descendants.”

“Can we see you?”

“Put out the lights!”

It had taken a long time—upwards of an hour—for the cat-spirit to rap out all this, and we were all wearied, bewildered and excited, so that it was in a frame of mind very different from that sceptical shrewdness which is the normal condition of the civilised European, that we sat in the dark, wondering what was to come next. Presently Herr Fritzjok said quietly:

“Iab being moved.”

And I thought I heard the handle of the door turned; but this must have been a mistake, as his voice came directly after, from the ceiling.

“Iab vloating ober your eds; be quiet, don’t sdir, or I won’t answer for der consequendces.”

We were quiet, and so were the spirits, for some half-hour, when my uncle, wearied out, said:

“Well, Herr Fritzjok, may we not light the lamp now? There seems nothing going on.”

No answer. We sat ten minutes longer, and then my uncle got up and struck a light.

Herr Fritzjok had vanished!

“He has been carried off by the Evil One!” shrieked my aunt, going into hysterics.

“Or was perhaps him himself,” said my uncle.

“Or a burgwar,” suggested Ormond.

“Ring the bell.”

“Look under the table.”

“Count the poonth.”

In the general confusion and fluster of the servants when summoned, no one was concealed anywhere, nor any article of value missing.

My aunt was revived and carried off to bed, very gently, for fear of disturbing Alice, whose room was next her mother’s, and then all the males of the family were summoned together for a grand Fritzjok hunt. We searched the house, the offices, the cellar, the stables, the garden, the shrubbery, for some time without effect, but at last a bold Buttons, a boy who feared nothing but short commons, and who had pursued his investigations with a lantern, to where a wicket-gate opened from a distant part of the garden into a lane, came rushing back to the house shouting:

“I’ve got summut!—I’ve got summut!”

“What have you got?” was the general cry, as we pressed towards him from all directions.

“My, haven’t the Dutchman and the old ’un been having a wrestle for it neither!” Buttons remarked, holding up an entire head of beautiful black hair, with whiskers, moustache, and beard to match.

“No nails left, only the hair?” asked Ormond.

After searching further, and finding nothing more, we shut the house up and went to bed.

Next morning no one brought me my hot water at the usual hour, and when I consequently rang the bell, it remained unanswered. Worse, when I went down stairs, I found no breakfast ready. What on earth could be the matter? Had What’s-his-name, after taking Herr Fritzjok for a whet, come back for the rest of the household? As I had rung my bed-room bell, I now rang that of the dining-room, with a similar lack of results; there was nothing for it but to explore. The hall-door was wide open, and my uncle’s hat and great coat were not on the pegs. Next I tried the stables, but the stalls were empty and the grooms gone. In the kitchen, however, I found a housemaid, with her arms on the dresser and her head on her arms, sobbing like a whipped child.

“What on earth is the matter, Mary?” I asked again and again, without getting any reply but—“Hi, hi, hi! oh, oh, oh!” At last, however, she pulled out of her pocket a letter addressed to me, in my uncle’s handwriting; it ran thus:

‘Sir, Sir, Sir!—You must have been in this disgraceful plot. You have abused my hospitality, and have acted like a viper. Let me never see your face again.

What did it all mean? how do vipers act? when had I ever formed a plot? My publishers had always complained that I was lamentably deficient in that respect.

“Mary, Mary, tell me, girl, what is the matter?”

“Hi, hi, hi!—oooh!”

“Hah, Buttons!” and I seized him by the collar. “What has happened?”

“You know,” he replied with a grin.

“Now, then,” said I, taking the youth by the ear, “will you answer me, and have half-a-crown, or will you be kicked until there is not a sound spot on your carcase?”

With the eye of genius, Buttons seized on the former alternative, and shouted in a breath:

“Miss Alice has bolted with the Dutchman, which his name is Jackson, and you know it. Give me the half-a-crown.”

On returning to the hall I met Harold Ormond, to whom my uncle had not thought fit to communicate his unjust suspicions of my connivance with the runaways.

“I am going to town,” said he.

“So am I,” I replied: “we can go together.”

“Yaas.”

And he said no more until the train approached the London station, when he said:

“I shall horthwhip that fellah!”

Poor Frank Jackson! But I have written to warn him to have his knickerbockers lined with leather.

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