Stella Fregelius by H. Rider Haggard (no david read aloud .TXT) 📕
- Author: H. Rider Haggard
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“She? Who?”
“My daughter, Mary; and—so—why shouldn’t they—you know?”
“Really, John, I must ask you to be a little more explicit. It’s no good your addressing me in your business ciphers.”
“Well—I mean—why shouldn’t he marry her? Morris marry Mary? Is that plain enough?” he asked in desperation.
For a moment a mist gathered before the Colonel’s eyes. Here was salvation indeed, if only it could be brought about. Oh! if only it could be brought about.
But the dark eyes never changed, nor did a muscle move upon that pale, commanding countenance.
“Morris marry Mary,” he repeated, dwelling on the alliterative words as though to convince himself that he had heard them aright. “That is a very strange proposition, my dear John, and sudden, too. Why, they are first cousins, and for that reason, I suppose, the thing never occurred to me—till last night,” he added to himself.
“Yes, I know, Colonel; but I am not certain that this first cousin business isn’t a bit exaggerated. The returns of the asylums seem to show it, and I know my doctor, Sir Henry Andrews, says it’s nonsense. You’ll admit that he is an authority. Also, it happened in my own family, my father and mother were cousins, and we are none the worse.”
On another occasion the Colonel might have been inclined to comment on this statement—of course, most politely. Now, however, he let it pass.
“Well, John,” he said, “putting aside the cousinship, let me hear what your idea is of the advantages of such a union, should the parties concerned change to consider it suitable.”
“Quite so, quite so, that’s business,” said Mr. Porson, brightening up at once. “From my point of view, these would be the advantages. As you know, Colonel, so far as I am concerned my origin, for the time I have been able to trace it—that’s four generations from old John Porson, the Quaker sugar merchant, who came from nobody knows where—although honest, is humble, and until my father’s day all in the line of retail trade. But then my dear wife came in. She was a governess when I married her, as you may have heard, and of a very good Scotch family, one of the Camerons, so Mary isn’t all of our cut—any more,” he added with a smile, “than Morris is all of yours. Still for her to marry a Monk would be a lift up—a considerable lift up, and looked at from a business point of view, worth a deal of money.
“Also, I like my nephew Morris, and I am sure that Mary likes him, and I’d wish the two of them to inherit what I have got. They wouldn’t have very long to wait for it, Colonel, for those doctors may say what they will, but I tell you,” he added, pathetically, tapping himself over the heart—“though you don’t mention it to Mary—I know better. Oh! yes, I know better. That’s about all, except, of course, that I should wish to see her settled before I’m gone. A man dies happier, you understand, if he is certain whom his only child is going to marry; for when he is dead I suppose that he will know nothing of what happens to her. Or, perhaps,” he added, as though by an afterthought, “he may know too much, and not be able to help; which would be painful, very painful.”
“Don’t get into those speculations, John,” said the Colonel, waving his hand. “They are unpleasant, and lead nowhere—sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.”
“Quite so, quite so. Life is a queer game of blind-man’s buff, isn’t it; played in a mist on a mountain top, and the players keep dropping over the precipices. But nobody heeds, because there are always plenty more, and the game goes on forever. Well, that’s my side of the case. Do you wish me to put yours?”
“I should like to hear your view of it.”
“Very good, it is this. Here’s a nice girl, no one can deny that, and a nice man, although he’s odd—you will admit as much. He’s got name, and he will have fame, or I am much mistaken. But, as it chances, through no fault of his, he wants money, or will want it, for without money the old place can’t go on, and without a wife the old race can’t go on. Now, Mary will have lots of money, for, to tell the truth, it keeps piling up until I am sick of it. I’ve been lucky in that way, Colonel, because I don’t care much about it, I suppose. I don’t think that I ever yet made a really bad investment. Just look. Two years ago, to oblige an old friend who was in the shop with me when I was young, I put 5,000 pounds into an Australian mine, never thinking to see it again. Yesterday I sold that stock for 50,000 pounds.”
“Fifty thousand pounds!” ejaculated the Colonel, astonished into admiration.
“Yes, or to be accurate, 49,375 pounds, 3s., 10d., and—that’s where the jar comes in—I don’t care. I never thought of it again since I got the broker’s note till this minute. I have been thinking all day about my heart, which is uneasy, and about what will happen to Mary when I am gone. What’s the good of this dirty money to a dying man? I’d give it all to have my wife and the boy I lost back for a year or two; yes, I would go into a shop again and sell sugar like my grandfather, and live on the profits from the till and the counter. There’s Mary calling. We must tell a fib, we must say that we thought she was to come to fetch us; don’t you forget. Well, there it is, perhaps you’ll think it over at your leisure.”
“Yes, John,” replied the Colonel, solemnly; “certainly I will think it over. Of course, there are pros and cons, but, on the whole, speaking offhand, I don’t see why the young people should not make a match. Also you have always been a good relative, and, what is better, a good friend to me, so, of course, if possible I should like to fall in with your wishes.”
Mr. Porson, who was advancing towards the door, wheeled round quickly.
“Thank you, Colonel,” he said, “I appreciate your sentiments; but don’t you make any mistake. It isn’t my wishes that have to be fallen in with—or your wishes. It’s the wishes of your son, Morris, and my daughter, Mary. If they are agreeable I’d like it well; if not, all the money in the world, nor all the families in the world, wouldn’t make me have anything to do with the job, or you either. Whatever our failings, we are honest men—both of us, who would not sell our flesh and blood for such trash as that.”
CHAPTER IV MARY PREACHES AND THE COLONEL PREVAILS
A fortnight had gone by, and during this time Morris was a frequent visitor at Seaview. Also his Cousin Mary had come over twice or thrice to lunch, with her father or without him. Once, indeed, she had stopped all the afternoon, spending most of it in the workshop with Morris. This workshop, it may be remembered, was the old chapel of the Abbey, a very beautiful and still perfect building, finished in early Tudor times, in which, by good fortune, the rich stained glass of the east window still remained. It made a noble and spacious laboratory, with its wide nave and lovely roof of chestnut wood, whereof the corbels were seraphs, white-robed and golden-winged.
“Are you not afraid to desecrate such a place with your horrid vices—I mean the iron things—and furnace and litter?” asked Mary. She had sunk down upon an anvil, on which lay a newspaper, the first seat that she could find, and thence surveyed the strange, incongruous scene.
“Well, if you ask, I don’t like it,” answered Morris. “But there is no other place that I can have, for my father is afraid of the forge in the house, and I can’t afford to build a workshop outside.”
“It ought to be restored,” said Mary, “with a beautiful organ in a carved case and a lovely alabaster altar and one of those perpetual lamps of silver—the French call them ‘veilleuses’, don’t they?—and the Stations of the Cross in carved oak, and all the rest of it.”
Mary, it may be explained, had a tendency to admire the outward adornments of ritualism if not its doctrines.
“Quite so,” answered Morris, smiling. “When I have from five to seven thousand to spare I will set about the job, and hire a high-church chaplain with a fine voice to come and say Mass for your benefit. By the way, would you like a confessional also? You omitted it from the list.”
“I think not. Besides, what on earth should I confess, except being always late for prayers through oversleeping myself in the morning, and general uselessness?”
“Oh, I daresay you might find something if you tried,” suggested Morris.
“Speak for yourself, please, Morris. To begin with your own account, there is the crime of sacrilege in using a chapel as a workshop. Look, those are all tombstones of abbots and other holy people, and under each tombstone one of them is asleep. Yet there you are, using strong language and whistling and making a horrible noise with hammers just above their heads. I wonder they don’t haunt you; I would if I were they.”
“Perhaps they do,” said Morris, “only I don’t see them.”
“Then they can’t be there.”
“Why not? Because things are invisible and intangible it does not follow that they don’t exist, as I ought to know as much as anyone.”
“Of course; but I am sure that if there were anything of that sort about you would soon be in touch with it. With me it is different; I could sleep sweetly with ghosts sitting on my bed in rows.”
“Why do you say that—about me, I mean?” asked Morris, in a more earnest voice.
“Oh, I don’t know. Go and look at your own eyes in the glass—but I daresay you do often enough. Look here, Morris, you think me very silly—almost foolish—don’t you?”
“I never thought anything of the sort. As a matter of fact, if you want to know, I think you a young woman rather more idle than most, and with a perfect passion for burying your talent in very white napkins.”
“Well, it all comes to the same thing, for there isn’t much difference between fool-born and fool-manufactured. Sometimes I wake up, however, and have moments of wisdom—as when I made you hear that thing, you know, thereby proving that it is all right, only useless—haven’t I?”
“I daresay; but come to the point.”
“Don’t be in a hurry. It is rather hard to express myself. What I mean is that you had better give up staring.”
“Staring? I never stared at you or anyone else, in my life!”
“Stupid Morris! By staring I mean star-gazing, and by star-gazing I mean trying to get away from the earth—in your mind, you know.”
Morris ran his fingers through his untidy hair and opened his lips to answer.
“Don’t contradict me,” she interrupted in a full steady voice. “That’s what you are thinking of half the day, and dreaming about all the night.”
“What’s that?” he ejaculated.
“I don’t know,” she answered, with a sudden access of indifference. “Do you know yourself?”
“I am waiting for instruction,” said Morris, sarcastically.
“All right, then, I’ll try. I mean that you are not satisfied with this world and those of us who live here. You keep trying to fashion another—oh! yes, you have been at it from a boy, you see I have got a good memory, I remember all your ‘vision stories’—and then you try to imagine its inhabitants.”
“Well,” said Morris, with the sullen air of a convicted criminal, “without admitting one word of this nonsense, what if I do?”
“Only that you had better look out that you don’t find whatever it
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