CHAPTER X
The English have been called a bad-tempered people, but this is to judge
of them by their manifestations; whereas an examination into causes
might prove them to be no worse tempered than that man is a bad sleeper
who lies in a biting bed. If a sagacious instinct directs them to
discountenance realistic tales, the realistic tale should justify its
appearance by the discovery of an apology for the tormented souls. Once
they sang madrigals, once they danced on the green, they revelled in
their lusty humours, without having recourse to the pun for fun, an
exhibition of hundreds of bare legs for jollity, a sentimental wailing
all in the throat for music. Evidence is procurable that they have
been an artificially-reared people, feeding on the genius of inventors,
transposers, adulterators, instead of the products of nature, for the
last half century; and it is unfair to affirm of them that they are
positively this or that. They are experiments. They are the sons and
victims of a desperate Energy, alluring by cheapness, satiating with
quantity, that it may mount in the social scale, at the expense of their
tissues. The land is in a state of fermentation to mount, and the shop,
which has shot half their stars to their social zenith, is what verily
they would scald themselves to wash themselves free of. Nor is it in any
degree a reprehensible sign that they should fly as from hue and cry the
title of tradesman. It is on the contrary the spot of sanity, which bids
us right cordially hope. Energy, transferred to the moral sense, may
clear them yet.
Meanwhile this beer, this wine, both are of a character to have killed
more than the tempers of a less gifted people. Martin Tinman invited Van
Diemen Smith to try the flavour of a wine that, as he said, he thought
of “laying down.”
It has been hinted before of a strange effect upon the minds of men who
knew what they were going to, when they received an invitation to dine
with Tinman. For the sake of a little social meeting at any cost,
they accepted it; accepted it with a sigh, midway as by engineering
measurement between prospective and retrospective; as nearly mechanical
as things human may be, like the Mussulman’s accustomed cry of Kismet.
Has it not been related of the little Jew babe sucking at its mother’s
breast in Jerusalem, that this innocent, long after the Captivity,
would start convulsively, relinquishing its feast, and indulging in
the purest. Hebrew lamentation of the most tenacious of races, at the
passing sound of a Babylonian or a Ninevite voice? In some such manner
did men, unable to refuse, deep in what remained to them of nature,
listen to Tinman; and so did Van Diemen, sighing heavily under the
operation of simple animal instinct.
“You seem miserable,” said Tinman, not oblivious of his design to give
his friend a fright.
“Do I? No, I’m all right,” Van Diemen replied. “I’m thinking of
alterations at the Hall before Summer, to accommodate guests--if I stay
here.”
“I suppose you would not like to be separated from Annette.”
“Separated? No, I should think I shouldn’t. Who’d do it?”
“Because I should not like to leave my good sister Martha all to herself
in a house so near the sea--”
“Why not go to the Crouch, man?”
“Thank you.”
“No thanks needed if you don’t take advantage of the offer.”
They were at the entrance to Elba, whither Mr. Tinman was betaking
himself to see his intended. He asked if Annette was at home, and to his
great stupefaction heard that she had gone to London for a week.
Dissembling the spite aroused within him, he postponed his very strongly
fortified design, and said, “You must be lonely.”
Van Diemen informed him that it would be for a night only, as young
Fellingham was coming down to keep him company.
“At six o’clock this evening, then,” said Tinman. “We’re not fashionable
in Winter.”
“Hang me, if I know when ever we were!” Van Diemen rejoined.
“Come, though, you’d like to be. You’ve got your ambition, Philip, like
other men.”
“Respectable and respected--that ‘s my ambition, Mr. Mart.”
Tinman simpered: “With your wealth!”
“Ay, I ‘m rich--for a contented mind.”
“I ‘m pretty sure you ‘ll approve my new vintage,” said Tinman. “It’s
direct from Oporto, my wine-merchant tells me, on his word.”
“What’s the price?”
“No, no, no. Try it first. It’s rather a stiff price.”
Van Diemen was partially reassured by the announcement. “What do you
call a stiff price?”
“Well!--over thirty.”
“Double that, and you may have a chance.”
“Now,” cried Tinman, exasperated, “how can a man from Australia know
anything about prices for port? You can’t divest your ideas of diggers’
prices. You’re like an intoxicating drink yourself on the tradesmen
of our town. You think it fine--ha! ha! I daresay, Philip, I should be
doing the same if I were up to your mark at my banker’s. We can’t all of
us be lords, nor baronets.”
Catching up his temper thus cleverly, he curbed that habitual runaway,
and retired from his old friend’s presence to explode in the society of
the solitary Martha.
Annette’s behaviour was as bitterly criticized by the sister as by the
brother.
“She has gone to those Fellingham people; and she may be thinking of
jilting us,” Mrs. Cavely said.
“In that case, I have no mercy,” cried her brother. “I have borne”--he
bowed with a professional spiritual humility--“as I should, but it may
get past endurance. I say I have borne enough; and if the worst comes to
the worst, and I hand him over to the authorities--I say I mean him no
harm, but he has struck me. He beat me as a boy and he has struck me
as a man, and I say I have no thought of revenge, but I cannot have
him here; and I say if I drive him out of the country back to his
Gippsland!”
Martin Tinman quivered for speech, probably for that which feedeth
speech, as is the way with angry men.
“And what?--what then?” said Martha, with the tender mellifluousness of
sisterly reproach. “What good can you expect of letting temper get the
better of you, dear?”
Tinman did not enjoy her recent turn for usurping the lead in their
consultations, and he said, tartly, “This good, Martha. We shall get the
Hall at my price, and be Head People here. Which,” he raised his note,
“which he, a Deserter, has no right to pretend to give himself out to
be. What your feelings may be as an old inhabitant, I don’t know, but I
have always looked up to the people at Elba Hall, and I say I don’t
like to have a Deserter squandering convict’s money there--with his
forty-pound-a-year cook, and his champagne at seventy a dozen. It’s the
luxury of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“That does not prevent its being very nice to dine there,” said Mrs.
Cavely; “and it shall be our table for good if I have any management.”
“You mean me, ma’am,” bellowed Tinman.
“Not at all,” she breathed, in dulcet contrast. “You are good-looking,
Martin, but you have not half such pretty eyes as the person I mean. I
never ventured to dream of managing you, Martin. I am thinking of the
people at Elba.”
“But why this extraordinary treatment of me, Martha?”
“She’s a child, having her head turned by those Fellinghams. But she’s
honourable; she has sworn to me she would be honourable.”
“You do think I may as well give him a fright?” Tinman inquired
hungrily.
“A sort of hint; but very gentle, Martin. Do be gentle--casual like--as
if you did n’t want to say it. Get him on his Gippsland. Then if he
brings you to words, you can always laugh back, and say you will go to
Kew and see the Fernery, and fancy all that, so high, on Helvellyn
or the Downs. Why”--Mrs. Cavely, at the end of her astute advices and
cautionings, as usual, gave loose to her natural character--“Why that
man came back to England at all, with his boastings of Gippsland, I
can’t for the life of me find out. It ‘s a perfect mystery.”
“It is,” Tinman sounded his voice at a great depth, reflectively. Glad
of taking the part she was perpetually assuming of late, he put out his
hand and said: “But it may have been ordained for our good, Martha.”
“True, dear,” said she, with an earnest sentiment of thankfulness to the
Power which had led him round to her way of thinking and feeling.