Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/278

. 31, 1861.] “My daughters—Mr. Pembroke,” said papa.

Sarah’s cough was distressing as she rose from her seat, and my legs trembled so that my curtsey—self-taught, by the way, for we had never had the benefit of a dancing-master—was quite a failure. I glanced at Rose: her cheeks were scarlet. And what was the colour of Mr. Pembroke’s hair? It might have been green as Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse’s when he had made use of the infallible dye, for anything I knew to the contrary, for full five minutes after my introduction.

The new curate began by offering a few remarks on the weather and his first impressions of the country, in a voice rather too loud for a drawing-room, but not unmusical. These were answered by Sarah in monosyllables, strangled in the birth by coughs. At length I took courage to look up. What colour was it? Black—black as the raven’s wing. This must then be he whom fate had predestined for my sister Sarah. Behold, the sympathetic chord was already touched in his bosom—he was inquiring anxiously about her cough.

“I am distressed to hear you cough so,” he said; “have you suffered in this way long, Miss Seaton?”

Sarah’s reply was completely choked.

“Yes, my daughter is subject to a cough,” said papa; “but I have seldom heard it so bad as this morning.”

“I believe cod-liver oil is the best remedy,” resumed the curate: “wonderful cures of long-standing disease are well authenticated to have been wrought by it.”

Long standing disease and cod-liver oil! Poor Sarah, this was a pleasant prelude to love-making! Papa resented it for her.

“My daughter’s lungs are quite sound, I am happy to say,” he remarked, in a tone which forbade anything further to be said on the subject; and Mr. Pembroke, after bestowing one more pitying glance on Sarah, began to talk of something else. He asked us if there were many pretty walks in the neighbourhood. This time it was Rose who answered. She was an artist; knew the whole length and breadth of the moor; had witnessed the different effects of sunrise, sunset, and the sun at his meridian on its broad rugged features; and she spoke with enthusiasm in its praise.

“Ah, you look strong,” said Mr. Pembroke, with a scarcely perceptible emphasis on the pronoun, which, however, papa did not appear to notice, for he observed, smiling:

“Ah! you judge by her colours, I see. Rose does not, however, always hoist such a crimson flag.”

A suggestion of consumption again under the diagnosis of the hectic flush I thought to myself, and I half expected to hear a second recommendation of the infallible cod-liver oil. But Mr. Pembroke was wiser: he might think these poor motherless girls were following their deceased parent at a galop to the churchyard, but he kept both pitying word and look to himself this time, and after a few more now-forgotten observations on matters irrelevant, rose to take his leave, papa accompanying him to the gate.

“Well, Sarah, is it he?” was my eager inquiry, as soon as we three sisters were alone.

“The very same,” she replied, confidently.

“It struck me, however, that Mr. Pembroke’s hands and feet were decidedly large—and if you recollect, they were to have been so very small,” I remarked, rather maliciously.

“Perhaps his boots and gloves did not fit,” suggested Rose.

“Well, I can’t answer for the boots, but he took a glove off to shake hands before departing, and I particularly noticed the hand. Mine felt like a child’s in the paw of a giant.”

“But then, Fanny, you know your hand is so very small,” said my sister Sarah, hoping perhaps, by this gentle flattery, to deprecate any further raillery on my part.

“Thank you, Sarah,” I returned; “then I must make no more odorous comparisons. And there is no mistake that Mr. Pembroke’s figure is tall and good, his hair black, his features of the Greek style of architecture, and that altogether he is a very handsome man. Sarah, I congratulate you: that pity is akin to love is well known, and there was, assuredly, ineffable pity in his eye the moment he heard that little cough of yours.”

“That horrid cough,” began Sarah.

“Say rather most opportune cough,” I interrupted. “You don’t know what you owe to it. I wonder whether Mr. Pembroke has a brother just like himself, only with light hair,” I went on, thinking to turn my artillery now against Rose.

“Oh, of course he has,” she answered, laughing, “and of course the light brother will come here to stay with the dark, and everything will happen just as it should do.”

“No, indeed Rose; you must not be in such a hurry. Mrs. Shipton’s house can never accommodate two lodgers at one and the same time; you must wait for your introduction till Sarah is married, and then she can bring her sister and her brother-in-law so nicely together under her own roof, and you will fall in love with one another as a matter of course.”

We did not see Mr. Pembroke again until we saw him in the pulpit the following Sunday morning.

“Much cry and little wool” was papa’s verdict on his curate’s first sermon, expressed as soon as we were out of hearing of the village congregation, within the garden gates of our own parsonage. “But he is a young hand, and it is to be hoped he will improve. It is sad, however, that pulpit oratory should be so entirely untaught at our Universities,” he went on, after a pause.

We were obliged silently to acquiesce in papa’s adaption of the old proverb. Mr. Pembroke had a fine voice—one at least which would have rolled sonorously through the cloistered aisles of some large and lofty cathedral. As the poet Wordsworth writes of Harry Gill’s,

But for our little church the sound was all too big, and when I afterwards asked Widow Barber why her little boy cried and behaved so badly that morning, she said it was the parson frightened