Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/192

. 10, 1861.] abscond and leave his lady-love, his servant—an old man, faithful and familiar, who has spent his life in the service of Orlando, his father, and grandfather—enters with a note. It is from Amelia. “We must part. All hope is extinguished. Oh, my Orlando!—but I must no longer call thee so. Filial duty—parental anger—must see thee no more—shall never love another—forget me—farewell!” Page blotted with tears. Orlando reads the note twice—crushes it—kisses it—grasps his brow with his extended hand (though how on earth he manages to do that, I can’t for the life of me explain; but, if anyone doubts that this is a regular novel action, I am prepared to quote chapter and verse to prove it; the name of a novel in which the hero does it is even now trembling on my tongue—but I forbear;)—gasps—chokes—and strops a razor. Our novelist’s eagle glance perceives that the moment has arrived. He closes his telescope, like Wellington at Waterloo, and orders up the novel uncle. What follows needs little explanation. The razor is returned to its case. The bailiffs are sent away satisfied. Orlando and the uncle drive to Amelia’s house. The money-bags overbalance the noble birth. The County Paris gets his dismissal and Orlando the lady, and the novel concludes in the regular ‘Morning Post’ style.

Another remedy which our novelist has at hand for a bad case of crossed love is the man who is supposed to be dead. This is sometimes the lover and sometimes the rival. I have known instances in which the lady’s father, who at the time was opposed to the marriage, had to undergo this temporary snuffing out. But most frequently it happens to the lover himself, and the means vary according to the period of which the novel treats. If the time is the knight-errant romantic period, the cause of the supposed death is an affray with hostile knights. In the time of Charles I., it is a fight with Cavaliers or Roundheads, as the case may be. In later times highwaymen are in general the instruments. After highwaymen the pressgang had its day. In novels treating of the last twenty years authors have been a good deal puzzled. Supposed death by drowning is the favourite. A fall while hunting has had its supporters, and the accidental discharge of a friend’s gun in a turnip-field is by no means uncommon. Duelling, too, still has its victims—in the novel. But if our novelist has exhausted all these means, he has only to take his hero to Italy, where he can get him assassinated, or nearly assassinated, quite consistently. The period makes not the slightest difference there.

“By the bones of Saint Jerome,” said the leech to Sir Adrian, “an the steel had pierced but the twentieth part of an inch farther, the haughty Inglese had gone the dark road. Assist me, Sir Knight, to remove his armour.”

“Certain death must have ensued,” said the Doctor, “if the stiletto had gone a shade deeper. You’d better telegraph, Mr. Jenkins.”

The sixteenth century, or the nineteenth, it does not matter—assassination is popularly believed to be the custom of the country, and the novelist ought to be thankful that there is one place left where he can have his hero romantically stabbed without the charge of extravagance being brought against him. Well! We must suppose the lover stabbed, but not killed. The effect is that the lady, shocked at the intelligence of his death, falls ill. Gradually she gets weaker and weaker. Nothing cheers her; nothing amuses her. The light leaves her eye, the rose her cheek, and her silvery laughter is heard no longer. Her parents, who were at first rather pleased that the objectionable lover was got rid of, begin at length to fear for their child’s happiness, then for her life, and end by bitterly regretting that they ever opposed her wishes. The County Paris, finding that there is no hope of success for his suit, retires, and our novelist, seeing all hindrances removed, sounds trumpets and the lover lives again.

When the supposed defunct is the rival and not the lover, a most extraordinary change takes place in his character. It is just as if the novelist had consented to let him live, on condition that he behaved better for the future. Some arrangement of this kind is absolutely necessary, for it is quite evident to every one that if he continues to act as he has been acting for two volumes and a half, there is no hope of the right people being married at the end of the book. So the novelist is compelled to take desperate measures with him. Accordingly the rival disappears for a time. People suppose he is dead. Everything goes on beautifully without him. The lady is delivered from his importunity: the lover from his rivalry. The parents are on the point of giving their consent to the marriage, when suddenly he re-appears. Oh! thinks every one, it’s all over with the lovers now. Not at all. He is quite a changed man. He disappeared a cruel, malicious, selfish villain: he reappears a mild, peaceable, benevolent creature, with no wish but for the good of his kind. When he disappeared he was the great opponent of the marriage: when he re-appears he is its great promoter. In fact, he seems to have absented himself for a time merely to “throw away the worser part of him,” and to have come back determined to “live the purer with the other half.”

But what is our novelist to do if he has already made use of all these stratagems in assisting other ill-starred lovers? How is he to help Orlando and Amelia then? How is he to help them! Why he has not yet employed the most favourite of all remedies for unhappy love affairs,—the specific, the grand specific, the novel bull.

Listen. Amelia wearing a red shawl (the heroine always puts on a red shawl to go into the field where the bull is) is walking through the verdant meadows with Orlando. When they reach the middle of the field (crafty animal that bull!—always lets them get to the middle of the field), Taurus shows himself, and bellows.

“Walk quietly to the gate,” says Orlando, “I’ll take off his attention.”

(Wonderful how easily the novel bull will allow his attention to be taken off!)

After a short hesitation Miss Amelia walks towards the gate, leaving the red shawl in Orlando’s hands. Taurus stares as if he scarcely understood this arrangement, finally does a little bellowing, and trots forward; Orlando shouts and waves the