CHAPTER IV

Annette Smith’s delight in her native England made her see beauty and

kindness everywhere around her; it put a halo about the house on the

beach, and thrilled her at Tinman’s table when she heard the thunder of

the waves hard by. She fancied it had been a most agreeable dinner to

her father and Mr. Herbert Fellingham--especially to the latter, who had

laughed very much; and she was astonished to hear them at breakfast both

complaining of their evening. In answer to which, she exclaimed, “Oh, I

think the situation of the house is so romantic!”

“The situation of the host is exceedingly so,” said Mr. Fellingham; “but

I think his wine the most unromantic liquid I have ever tasted.”

“It must be that!” cried Van Diemen, puzzled by novel pains in the head.

“Old Martin woke up a little like his old self after dinner.”

“He drank sparingly,” said Mr. Fellingham.

“I am sure you were satirical last night,” Annette said reproachfully.

“On the contrary, I told him I thought he was in a romantic situation.”

“But I have had a French mademoiselle for my governess and an Oxford

gentleman for my tutor; and I know you accepted French and English from

Mr. Tinman and his sister that I should not have approved.”

“Netty,” said Van Diemen, “has had the best instruction money could

procure; and if she says you were satirical, you may depend on it you

were.”

“Oh, in that case, of course!” Mr. Fellingham rejoined. “Who could help

it?”

He thought himself warranted in giving the rein to his wicked satirical

spirit, and talked lightly of the accidental character of the letter H

in Tinman’s pronunciation; of how, like somebody else’s hat in a high

wind, it descended on somebody else’s head, and of how his words walked

about asking one another who they were and what they were doing, danced

together madly, snapping their fingers at signification; and so forth.

He was flippant.

Annette glanced at her father, and dropped her eyelids.

Mr. Fellingham perceived that he was enjoined to be on his guard.

He went one step farther in his fun; upon which Van Diemen said, with a

frown, “If you please!”

Nothing could withstand that.

“Hang old Mart Tinman’s wine!” Van Diemen burst out in the dead pause.

“My head’s a bullet. I’m in a shocking bad temper. I can hardly see. I’m

bilious.”

Mr. Fellingham counselled his lying down for an hour, and he went

grumbling, complaining of Mart Tinman’s incredulity about the towering

beauty of a place in Australia called Gippsland.

Annette confided to Mr. Fellingham, as soon as they were alone,

the chivalrous nature of her father in his friendships, and his

indisposition to hear a satirical remark upon his old schoolmate, the

moment he understood it to be satire.

Fellingham pleaded: “The man’s a perfect burlesque. He’s as distinctly

made to be laughed at as a mask in a pantomime.”

“Papa will not think so,” said Annette; “and papa has been told that he

is not to be laughed at as a man of business.”

“Do you prize him for that?”

“I am no judge. I am too happy to be in England to be a judge of

anything.”

“You did not touch his wine!”

“You men attach so much importance to wine!”

“They do say that powders is a good thing after Mr. Tinman’s wine,”

observed Mrs. Crickledon, who had come into the sitting-room to take

away the breakfast things.

Mr. Fellingham gave a peal of laughter; but Mrs Crickledon bade him be

hushed, for Mr. Van Diemen Smith had gone to lay down his poor aching

head on his pillow. Annette ran upstairs to speak to her father about a

doctor.

During her absence, Mr. Fellingham received the popular portrait of Mr.

Tinman from the lips of Mrs. Crickledon. He subsequently strolled to the

carpenter’s shop, and endeavoured to get a confirmation of it.

“My wife talks too much,” said Crickledon.

When questioned by a gentleman, however, he was naturally bound to

answer to the extent of his knowledge.

“What a funny old country it is!” Mr. Fellingham said to Annette, on

their walk to the beach.

She implored him not to laugh at anything English.

“I don’t, I assure you,” said he. “I love the country, too. But when

one comes back from abroad, and plunges into their daily life, it’s

difficult to retain the real figure of the old country seen from

outside, and one has to remember half a dozen great names to right

oneself. And Englishmen are so funny! Your father comes here to see his

old friend, and begins boasting of the Gippsland he has left behind.

Tinman immediately brags of Helvellyn, and they fling mountains at one

another till, on their first evening together, there’s earthquake and

rupture--they were nearly at fisticuffs at one time.”

“Oh! surely no,” said Annette. “I did not hear them. They were good

friends when you came to the drawingroom. Perhaps the wine did affect

poor papa, if it was bad wine. I wish men would never drink any. How

much happier they would be.”

“But then there would cease to be social meetings in England. What

should we do?”

“I know that is a sneer; and you were nearly as enthusiastic as I was on

board the vessel,” Annette said, sadly.

“Quite true. I was. But see what quaint creatures we have about us!

Tinman practicing in his Court suit before the chiwal-glass! And that

good fellow, the carpenter, Crickledon, who has lived with the sea

fronting him all his life, and has never been in a boat, and he

confesses he has only once gone inland, and has never seen an acorn!”

“I wish I could see one--of a real English oak,” said Annette.

“And after being in England a few months you will be sighing for the

Continent.”

“Never!”

“You think you will be quite contented here?”

“I am sure I shall be. May papa and I never be exiles again! I did not

feel it when I was three years old, going out to Australia; but it would

be like death to me now. Oh!” Annette shivered, as with the exile’s

chill.

“On my honour,” said Mr. Fellingham, as softly as he could with the wind

in his teeth, “I love the old country ten times more from your love of

it.”

“That is not how I want England to be loved,” returned Annette.

“The love is in your hands.”

She seemed indifferent on hearing it.

He should have seen that the way to woo her was to humour her

prepossession by another passion. He could feel that it ennobled her in

the abstract, but a latent spite at Tinman on account of his wine, to

which he continued angrily to attribute as unwonted dizziness of the

head and slight irascibility, made him urgent in his desire that she

should separate herself from Tinman and his sister by the sharp division

of derision.

Annette declined to laugh at the most risible caricatures of Tinman. In

her antagonism she forced her simplicity so far as to say that she did

not think him absurd. And supposing Mr. Tinman to have proposed to the

titled widow, Lady Ray, as she had heard, and to other ladies young and

middle-aged in the neighbourhood, why should he not, if he wished to

marry? If he was economical, surely he had a right to manage his own

affairs. Her dread was lest Mr. Tinman and her father should quarrel

over the payment for the broken chiwal-glass: that she honestly

admitted, and Fellingham was so indiscreet as to roar aloud, not so very

cordially.

Annette thought him unkindly satirical; and his thoughts of her reduced

her to the condition of a commonplace girl with expressive eyes.

She had to return to her father. Mr. Fellingham took a walk on the

springy turf along the cliffs; and “certainly she is a commonplace

girl,” he began by reflecting; with a side eye at the fact that his

meditations were excited by Tinman’s poisoning of his bile. “A girl

who can’t see the absurdity of Tinman must be destitute of common

intelligence.” After a while he sniffed the fine sharp air of mingled

earth and sea delightedly, and he strode back to the town late in the

afternoon, laughing at himself in scorn of his wretched susceptibility

to bilious impressions, and really all but hating Tinman as the cause

of his weakness--in the manner of the criminal hating the detective,

perhaps. He cast it altogether on Tinman that Annette’s complexion

of character had become discoloured to his mind; for, in spite of

the physical freshness with which he returned to her society, he was

incapable of throwing off the idea of her being commonplace; and it

was with regret that he acknowledged he had gained from his walk only a

higher opinion of himself.

Her father was the victim of a sick headache, [Migraine--D.W.]and lay,

a groaning man, on his bed, ministered to by Mrs. Crickledon chiefly.

Annette had to conduct the business with Mr. Phippun and Mr. Tinman as

to payment for the chiwal-glass. She was commissioned to offer half the

price for the glass on her father’s part; more he would not pay. Tinman

and Phippun sat with her in Crickledon’s cottage, and Mrs. Crickledon

brought down two messages from her invalid, each positive, to the effect

that he would fight with all the arms of English law rather than yield

his point.

Tinman declared it to be quite out of the question that he should pay

a penny. Phippun vowed that from one or the other of them he would have

the money.

Annette naturally was in deep distress, and Fellingham postponed the

discussion to the morrow.

Even after such a taste of Tinman as that, Annette could not be induced

to join in deriding him privately. She looked pained by Mr. Fellingham’s

cruel jests. It was monstrous, Fellingham considered, that he should

draw on himself a second reprimand from Van Diemen Smith, while they

were consulting in entire agreement upon the case of the chiwal-glass.

“I must tell you this, mister sir,” said Van Diemen, “I like you, but

I’ll be straightforward and truthful, or I’m not worthy the name of

Englishman; and I do like you, or I should n’t have given you leave to

come down here after us two. You must respect my friend if you care for

my respect. That’s it. There it is. Now you know my conditions.”

“I ‘m afraid I can’t sign the treaty,” said Fellingham.

“Here’s more,” said Van Diemen. “I’m a chilly man myself if I hear a

laugh and think I know the aim of it. I’ll meet what you like except

scorn. I can’t stand contempt. So I feel for another. And now you know.”

“It puts a stopper on the play of fancy, and checks the throwing off of

steam,” Fellingham remonstrated. “I promise to do my best, but of all

the men I’ve ever met in my life--Tinman!--the ridiculous! Pray pardon

me; but the donkey and his looking-glass! The glass was misty! He--as

particular about his reflection in the glass as a poet with his verses!

Advance, retire, bow; and such murder of the Queen’s English in the very

presence! If I thought he was going to take his wine with him, I’d have

him arrested for high treason.”

“You’ve chosen, and you know what you best like,” said Van Diemen,

pointing his accents--by which is produced the awkward pause, the

pitfall of conversation, and sometimes of amity.

Thus it happened that Mr. Herbert Fellingham journeyed back to London

a day earlier than he had intended, and without saying what he meant to

say.