Agathas Husband | Page 3

one of the old school of Chesterfield perfection, which is fast dying out.
Everybody liked him, more or less; and some people--a few men and not a few women, had either in friendship or in warmer fashion--deeply loved him. Society in general was quite aware of this; nor, it must be confessed, did Major Harper at all attempt to disprove or ignore the fact. He wore his honours--as he did a cross won, no one quite knew how, during a brief service in the Peninsula--neither pompously nor boastingly, but with the mild indifference of conscious desert.
All this could be at once discerned in his face, voice, and manner; from which likewise a keen observer might draw the safe conclusion that, though a decided man of fashion, and something of a dandy, he was above either puppyism or immorality. And Agatha's rich Anglo-Indian father had not judged foolishly when he put his only child and her property in the trust of, as he believed, that rare personage, an honest man.
If the girl Agatha, who took honesty as a matter of course in every gentleman, endowed this particular one with a few qualities more than he really possessed, it was an amiable weakness on her part, for which, as Major Harper would doubtless have said with a seriously troubled countenance, "no one could possibly blame him."
In speaking of the Major we have taken little notice--as little, indeed, as Agatha did--of the younger Mr. Harper.
"My brother, Miss Bowen. He came home when my sister Emily died." The brief introduction terminated in a slight fall of voice, which made the young lady look sympathisingly at the handsome face that took shades of sadness as easily as shades of mirth. In her interest for the Major she merely bowed to his brother; just noticed that the stranger was a tall, fair "boy," not at all resembling her own friend; and after a polite speech or two of welcome, to which Mr. Harper answered very briefly, she hardly looked at him again until she and her guests adjourned to the family drawing-room of Dr. Ianson.
There, the Major happening to be engrossed by doing earnest politeness to Mrs. Thornycroft and her mother, Agatha had to enter side by side with the younger brother, and likewise to introduce him to the worthy family whose inmate she was.
She did so, making the whole circuit of the room towards Miss Jane Ianson, in the hope that he would cast anchor, or else be grappled by that young lady, and so she should get rid of him. However, fate was adverse; the young gentleman showed no inclination to be thus put aside, and Miss Bowen, driven to despair, was just going to extinguish him altogether with some specimen of the unceremonious manner which she occasionally showed to "boys," when, observing him more closely, she discovered that he could not exactly come under this category.
His fair face, fair hair, and thin, stripling-like figure, had deceived her. Investigating deeper, there was a something in his grave eye and firmly-set mouth which bespoke the man, not the boy. Agatha, who, treating him with a careless womanly superiority that girls of nineteen use, had asked "how long he had been in Canada?" and been answered "Fifteen years,"--hesitated at her next intended question--the very rude and malicious one--"How old he was when he left home?"
"I was, as you say, very young when I quitted England," he answered, to a less pointed remark of Miss Ianson's. "I must have been a lad of nine or ten--little more."
Agatha quite started to think of the disrespectful way in which she had treated a gentleman twenty-five years old! It made her shy and uncomfortable for some minutes, and she rather repented of her habit of patronising "boys."
However, what was even twenty-five? A raw, uncouth age. No man was really good for anything until he was thirty. And, as quickly as courtesy and good feeling allowed her, she glided from the uninteresting younger brother to the charmed circle where the elder was talking away, as only Major Harper could talk, using all the weapons of conversation by turns, to a degree that never can be truly described. Like Taglioni's entrechats, or Grisi's melodious notes, such extrinsic talent dies on the senses of the listener, who cannot prove, scarcely even explain, but only say that it was so. Nevertheless, with all his power of amusing, a keen observer might have discerned in Major Harper a want of depth--of reading--of thought; a something that marked out the man of society in contradiction to the man of intellect or of letters. Had he been an author--which he was once heard to thank Heaven he was not--he would probably have been one of those shallow, fashionable sentimentalists who hang like Mahomed's coffin between earth and heaven,