Two Years Ago, Volume I | Page 9

said Claude: "and is she with you?"
"With the old man, the angel! tending him night and day."
"And as beautiful as ever?"
"Sir!" said Mark solemnly, "when any one's soul is as beautiful as hers is, one never thinks about her face."
"Who is Grace?" asked Stangrave.
"A saint and a heroine!" said Claude. "You shall know all; for you ought to know. But you have no news of Tom; and I have none either. I am losing all hope now."
"I'm not, sir!" said Mark fiercely. "Sir, that boy's not dead; he can't be. He has more lives than a cat, and if you know anything of him, you ought to know that."
"I have good reason to know it, none more: but--"
"But, sir! But what? Harm come to him, sir? The Lord wouldn't harm him for his father's sake; and as for the devil!--I tell you, sir, if he tried to fly away with him, he'd have to drop him before he'd gone a mile!" And Mark began blowing his nose violently, and getting so red that he seemed on the point of going into a fit.
"Tell you what it is, gentlemen," said he at last, "you come and stay with me, and see his father. It will comfort the old man--and--and comfort me too; for I get down-hearted about him at times."
"Strange attraction there was about that man," says Stangrave, sotto voce to Claude.
"He was like a son to him--"
"Now, gentlemen. Mr. Mellot, you don't hunt?"
"No, thank you," said Claude.
"Mr. Stangrave does, I'll warrant."
"I have at various times, both in England and in Virginia."
"Ah! Do they keep up the real sport there, eh? Well that's the best thing I've heard of them, sir!--My horses are yours!--A friend of that boy, sir, is welcome to lame the whole lot, and I won't grumble. Three days a week, sir. Breakfast at eight, dinner at 5.30--none of your late London hours for me, sir; and after it the best bottle of port, though I say it, short of my friend S----'s, at Reading."
"You must accept," whispered Claude, "or he will be angry."
So Stangrave accepted; and all the more readily because he wanted to hear from the good banker many things about the lost Tom Thurnall.
* * * * *
"Here we are," cries Mark. "Now, you must excuse me: see to yourselves. I see to the puppies. Dinner at 5.30, mind! Come along, Goodman, boy!"
"Is this Whitbury?" asks Stangrave.
It was Whitbury, indeed. Pleasant old town, which slopes down the hill-side to the old church,--just "restored," though by Lords Minchampstead and Vieuxbois, not without Mark Armsworth's help, to its ancient beauty of grey flint and white clunch chequer-work, and quaint wooden spire. Pleasant churchyard round it, where the dead lie looking up to the bright southern sun, among huge black yews, upon their knoll of white chalk above the ancient stream. Pleasant white wooden bridge, with its row of urchins dropping flints upon the noses of elephantine trout, or fishing over the rail with crooked pins, while hapless gudgeon come dangling upward between stream and sky, with a look of sheepish surprise and shame, as of a school-boy caught stealing apples, in their foolish visages. Pleasant new national schools at the bridge end, whither the urchins scamper at the sound of the two o'clock bell. Though it be an ugly pile enough of bright red brick, it is doing its work, as Whitbury folk know well by now. Pleasant, too, though still more ugly, those long red arms of new houses which Whitbury is stretching out along its fine turnpikes,--especially up to the railway station beyond the bridge, and to the smart new hotel, which hopes (but hopes in vain) to outrival the ancient "Angler's Rest." Away thither, and not to the Railway Hotel, they trundle in a fly--leaving Mark Armsworth all but angry because they will not sleep, as well as breakfast, lunch, and dine with him daily,--and settle in the good old inn, with its three white gables overhanging the pavement, and its long lattice window buried deep beneath them, like--so Stangrave says--to a shrewd kindly eye under a bland white forehead.
No, good old inn; not such shall be thy fate, as long as trout are trout, and men have wit to catch them. For art thou not a sacred house? Art thou not consecrate to the Whitbury brotherhood of anglers! Is not the wainscot of that long low parlour inscribed with many a famous name? Are not its walls hung with many a famous countenance? Has not its oak-ribbed ceiling rung, for now a hundred years, to the laughter of painters, sculptors, grave divines (unbending at least there), great lawyers, statesmen, wits, even of Foote and Quin themselves; while the sleek landlord wiped the cobwebs off another magnum of that grand old port, and took