The Mighty Atom | Page 7

came. I'm very glad Professor Cadman-Gore is able to accept a few weeks of holiday tuition,--he is expensive certainly,--but he will remedy all the mischief
Montrose has done, and get Lionel on;--he is a thoroughly reliable man too, on the religious question."
Soothed by the prospect of the coming of Professor Cadman-Gore, Mr. Valliscourt cooled down, and presently went to join his wife and Sir Charles Lascelles in the drawing-room. He found that apartment empty however, and on inquiry of one of the servants, learnt that Sir Charles had been gone some minutes, and that Mrs. Valliscourt was walking by herself in the garden. Mr. Valliscourt thereupon went to one of the deep bay-windows which stood open, and sniffed the scented summer air. The day's rain had certainly left the ground wet, and he was not fond of strolling about under damp trees. The moon was high, and very beautiful in her clear fullness, but Mr. Valliscourt did not admire moonlight effects,--he thought all that kind of thing 'stagey.' The grave and devotional silence of the night hallowed the landscape,--Mr. Valliscourt disliked silence, and he therefore coughed loudly and with much unpleasant throat-scraping, to disturb it. Throat-scraping gave just the necessary suggestion of prose to a picture which would otherwise have been purely romantic,--a picture of shadowed woodland and hill and silver cloud and purple sky, in all of which beauteous presentments, mere humanity seemed blotted out and forgotten. Mr. Valliscourt coughed his ugly cough in order to get humanity into it,--and as he finished the last little hawking note of irritating noise, he wondered where his wife was. The garden was a large and rambling one, and had been long and greatly neglected, though the owners of the place had shrewdly arranged with Mr. Valliscourt, when he had taken the house for three months, that he should pay a gardener weekly wages to attend to it. A decent but dull native of Combmartin had been elected to this post, and his exertions had certainly effected something in the way of clearing the paths and keeping them clean,--but he was apparently incapable of dealing with the wild growth of sweet-briar, myrtle, fuchsia and bog-oak that had sprung up everywhere in the erratic yet always artistic fashion of mother Nature, when she is left to design her own woodland ways,--so that the entire pleasaunce was more a wilderness than anything else. Yet it had its attractions, or seemed to have, at least for Mrs. Valliscourt, for she passed nearly all her time in it. Now, however, owing to the long shadows, her husband could not perceive her anywhere, though presently, as he stood at the window, he heard her voice carolling an absurd ditty, of which he caught a distinct fragment concerning
"Gay Bo-hem-i-ah!
We're not particular what we do
In gay Bo-hem-i-ah,"-- whereat, his face, cold and heavy-featured as it was, grew downright ugly in its expression of malign contempt.
"She ought to have been a music-hall singer!" he said to himself with a kind of inward snarl--"She has all the taste and talent required for it. And to think she is actually well born and well educated! What an atrocious anomaly!"
He banged the window to violently, and went within. There was a smoking-room at the back of the house, and thither he retired with his cigar-case, and one of the dullest of all the various dull evening papers.
CHAPTER III.
EARLY the next morning between six and seven o'clock, little Lionel Valliscourt was up and dressed and sitting by his bedroom window, cap in hand, waiting eagerly for Montrose to appear. He was going to see his friendly tutor off by the coach, and the idea was not without a certain charm and excitement. It was a perfect day, bright with unclouded sunshine, and all the birds were singing ecstatically. The boy's sensitive soul was divided between sadness and pleasure,--sadness at losing the companionship of the blithe, kindly, good-natured young fellow who alone, out of all his various teachers, had seemed to understand and sympathise with him,--pleasure at the novelty of getting up 'on the sly' and slipping out and away without his father's knowledge, and seeing the coach, with its prancing four horses, its jolly driver, and its still jollier red-faced guard, all at a halt outside the funny old inn, called by various wags the 'Pack o' Cards' on account of its peculiar structure,--and watching Mr. Montrose climb up thereon to the too-tootle-tooing of the horn, and then finally, beholding the whole glorious equipage dash away at break-neck speed to Barnstaple! This was something for a boy, as mere boy, to look forward to with a thrill of expectation;--but deep down in his heart of hearts he was thinking of another delight as well,--a plan he had formed in secret, and of which he had