Love Me Little, Love Me Long | Page 8

and smiling in the background. While the servants were unpacking the carriage, Mr. Fountain took Lucy to her bedroom. Mrs. Brown had gone on before to see for the third time whether all was comfortable. There was a huge fire, all red; and on the table a gigantic nosegay of spring flowers, with smell to them all.
"Oh how nice, after a journey!" said Lucy, mowing down Uncle Fountain and Mrs. Brown with one comprehensive smile.
Mrs. Brown flamed with complacency.
"What!" cried her uncle; "I suppose you expected a black fire and impertinent apologies by way of substitute for warmth; a stuffy room, and damp sheets, roasted, like a woodcock, twenty minutes before use."
"No, uncle, dear, I expected every comfort at Font Abbey." Brown retired with a courtesy.
"Aha! What! you have found out that it is all humbug about old bachelors not knowing comfort? Do bachelors ever put their friends into damp sheets? No; that is the women's trick with their household science. Your sex have killed more men with damp sheets than ever fell by the sword."
"Yet nobody erects monuments to us," put in Lucy, slyly.
She missed fire. Uncle Fountain, like most Englishmen, could take in a pun by the ear, but wit only by the eye. "Do you remember when Mrs. Bazalgette put you into the linen sponge, and killed you?"
"Killed me?"
"Certainly, as far as in her lay. We can but do our best; well, she did hers, and went the right way to work."
"You see I survive."
"By a miracle. Dinner is at six."
"Very well, dear."
"Yes; but six in this house means sixty minutes after five and sixty minutes before seven. I mention this the first day because you are just come from a place where it means twenty minutes to seven; also let me observe that I think I have noticed soup and potatoes eat better hot than cold, and meat tastes nicer done to a turn than--"
"To a cinder?"
"Ha! ha! and come with an appetite, please."
"Uncle, no tyranny, I beg."
"Tyranny? you know this is Liberty Hall; only when I eat I expect my companion to-eat too; besides, there is nothing to be gained by humbug to-day. There will be only us two at dinner; and when I see young ladies fiddling with an asparagus head instead of eating their dinner, it don't fall into the greenhorn's notion--exquisite creature! all soul! no stomach! feeds on air, ideas, and quadrille music--no; what do you think I say?"
"Something flattering, I feel sure."
"On the contrary, something true. I say hypocrite! Been grubbing like a pig all day, so can't eat like a Christian at meal time; you can't humbug me."
"Alas! so I see. That decides me to be candid--and hungry."
"Well, I am off; I don't stick to my friends and bore them with my affairs like that egotistical hussy, Jane Bazalgette. I amuse myself, and leave them to amuse themselves; that is my notion of politeness. I am going to see my pigs fed, then into the village. I am building a new blacksmith's shop there (you must come and look at it the first thing to-morrow); and at six, if you want to find me--"
"I shall peep behind the soup-tureen."
"And there I shall be, if I am alive." At dinner the old boy threw himself into the work with such zeal that soon after the cloth was removed, from fatigue and repletion, he dropped asleep, with his shoulder toward Lucy, but his face instinctively turned toward the fire. Lucy crept away on tiptoe, not to disturb him.
In about an hour he bustled into the drawing-room, ordered tea, blew up the footman because the cook had not water boiling that moment, drank three cups, then brightened up, rubbed his hands, and with a cheerful, benevolent manner, "Now, Lucy," cried he, "come and help me puzzle out this tiresome genealogy."
A smile of warm assent from Lucy, and the old bachelor and the blooming Hebe were soon seated with a mountain of parchments by their side, and a tree spreading before them.
It was not a finite tree like an elm or an oak; no, it was a banyan tree; covered an acre, and from its boughs little suckers dropped to earth, and turned to little trees, and had suckers in their turn, and "confounded the confusion."
Uncle Fountain's happiness depended, _pro tem,_ on proving that he was a sucker from the great bough of the Fontaines of Melton; and why? Because, this effected, he had only to go along that bough by an established pedigree to the great trunk of the Funteyns of Salle, and the first Funteyn of Salle was said to be (and this he hoped to prove true) great-grandson of Robert de Fontibus, son of John de Fonte.
Now Uncle Fountain could prove himself the shoot of George his father (a step at