write it down, finding God’s actual dealings here much too wonderful to dare to invent many fresh ones for myself.
Lancelot, who had had a severe concussion of the brain and a broken leg, kept his bed for a few weeks, and his room for a few more. Colonel Bracebridge installed himself at the Priory, and nursed him with indefatigable good-humour and few thanks. He brought Lancelot his breakfast before hunting, described the run to him when he returned, read him to sleep, told him stories of grizzly bear and buffalo-hunts, made him laugh in spite of himself at extempore comic medleys, kept his tables covered with flowers from the conservatory, warmed his chocolate, and even his bed. Nothing came amiss to him, and he to nothing. Lancelot longed at first every hour to be rid of him, and eyed him about the room as a bulldog does the monkey who rides him. In his dreams he was Sinbad the Sailor, and Bracebridge the Old Man of the Sea; but he could not hold out against the colonel’s merry bustling kindliness, and the almost womanish tenderness of his nursing. The ice thawed rapidly; and one evening it split up altogether, when Bracebridge, who was sitting drawing by Lancelot’s sofa, instead of amusing himself with the ladies below, suddenly threw his pencil into the fire, and broke out, à propos de rien—
‘What a strange pair we are, Smith! I think you just the best fellow I ever met, and you hate me like poison—you can’t deny it.’
There was something in the colonel’s tone so utterly different from his usual courtly and measured speech, that Lancelot was taken completely by surprise, and stammered out—
‘I—I—I—no—no. I know I am very foolish—ungrateful. But I do hate you,’ he said, with a sudden impulse, ‘and I’ll tell you why.’
‘Give me your hand,’ quoth the colonel: ‘I like that. Now we shall see our way with each other, at least.’
‘Because,’ said Lancelot slowly, ‘because you are cleverer than I, readier than I, superior to me in every point.’
The colonel laughed, not quite merrily. Lancelot went on, holding down his shaggy brows.
‘I am a brute and an ass!—And yet I do not like to tell you so. For if I am an ass, what are you?’
‘Heyday!’
‘Look here.—I am wasting my time and brains on ribaldry, but I am worth nothing better—at least, I think so at times; but you, who can do anything you put your hand to, what business have you, in the devil’s name, to be throwing yourself away on gimcracks and fox-hunting foolery? Heavens! If I had your talents, I’d be—I’d make a name for myself before I died, if I died to make it.’ The colonel griped his hand hard, rose, and looked out of the window for a few minutes. There was a dead, brooding silence, till he turned to Lancelot—
‘Mr. Smith, I thank you for your honesty, but good advice may come too late. I am no saint, and God only knows how much less of one I may become; but mark my words—if you are ever tempted by passion, and vanity, and fine ladies, to form liaisons, as the Jezebels call them, snares, and nets, and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating yourself and hating the chain to which you cling—in that hour pray—pray as if the devil had you by the throat—to Almighty God, to help you out of that cursed slough! There is nothing else for it!—pray, I tell you!’
There was a terrible earnestness about the guardsman’s face which could not be mistaken. Lancelot looked at him for a moment, and then dropped his eyes ashamed, as if he had intruded on the speaker’s confidence by witnessing his emotion.
In a moment the colonel had returned to his smile and his polish.
‘And now, my dear invalid, I must beg your pardon for sermonising. What do you say to a game of écarté? We must play for love, or we shall excite ourselves, and scandalise Mrs. Lavington’s piety.’ And the colonel pulled a pack of cards out of his pocket, and seeing that Lancelot was too thoughtful for play, commenced all manner of juggler’s tricks, and chuckled over them like any schoolboy.
‘Happy man!’ thought Lancelot, ‘to have the strength of will which can thrust its thoughts away once and for all.’ No, Lancelot! more happy are they whom God will not allow to thrust their thoughts from them till the bitter draught has done its work.
From that day, however, there was a cordial understanding between the two. They never alluded to the subject; but they had known the bottom of each other’s heart. Lancelot’s sick-room was now pleasant enough, and he drank in daily his new friend’s perpetual stream of anecdote, till March and hunting were past, and April was half over. The old squire came up after dinner regularly (during March he had hunted every day, and slept every evening); and the trio chatted along merrily enough, by the help of whist and backgammon, upon the surface of this little island of life—which is, like Sinbad’s, after all only the back of a floating whale, ready to dive at any moment.—And then?—
But what was Argemone doing all this time? Argemone was busy in her boudoir (too often a true boudoir to her) among books and statuettes, and dried flowers, fancying herself, and not unfairly, very intellectual. She had four new manias every year; her last winter’s one had been that bottle-and-squirt mania, miscalled chemistry; her spring madness was for the Greek drama. She had devoured Schlegel’s lectures, and thought them divine; and now she was hard at work on Sophocles, with a little help from translations, and thought she understood him every word. Then she was somewhat High-Church in her notions, and used to go up every Wednesday and Friday to the chapel in the hills, where Lancelot had met her, for an hour’s mystic devotion, set off by a little graceful asceticism. As for Lancelot, she never thought of him but as an empty-headed fox-hunter who had met with his deserts; and the brilliant accounts which the all smoothing colonel gave at dinner of Lancelot’s physical well doing and agreeable conversation only made her set him down the sooner as a twin clever-do-nothing to the despised Bracebridge, whom she hated for keeping her father in a roar of laughter.
But her sister, little Honoria, had all the while been busy messing and cooking with her own hands for the invalid; and almost fell in love with the colonel for his watchful kindness. And here a word about Honoria, to whom Nature, according to her wont with sisters, had given almost everything which Argemone wanted, and denied almost everything which Argemone had, except beauty. And even in that, the many-sided mother had made her a perfect contrast to her sister—tiny and luscious, dark-eyed and dark-haired; as full of wild simple passion as an Italian, thinking little, except where she felt much—which was, indeed, everywhere; for she lived in a perpetual April-shower of exaggerated sympathy for all suffering, whether in novels or in life; and daily gave the lie to that shallow old calumny, that ‘fictitious sorrows harden the heart to real ones.’
Argemone was almost angry with her sometimes, when she trotted whole days about the village from school to sick-room: perhaps conscience hinted to her that her duty, too, lay rather there than among her luxurious day-dreams. But, alas! though she would have indignantly repelled the accusation of selfishness, yet in self and for self alone she lived; and while she had force of will for any so-called ‘self-denial,’ and would fast herself cross and stupefied, and quite enjoy kneeling thinly clad and barefoot on the freezing chapel-floor on a winter’s morning, yet her fastidious delicacy revolted at sitting, like Honoria, beside the bed of the ploughman’s consumptive daughter, in a reeking, stifling, lean-to garret, in which had slept the night before, the father, mother, and two grown-up boys, not to mention a new-married couple, the sick girl, and, alas! her baby. And of such bedchambers there were too many in Whitford Priors.
The first evening that Lancelot came downstairs, Honoria clapped her hands outright for joy as he entered, and ran up and down for ten minutes, fetching and carrying endless unnecessary cushions and footstools; while Argemone greeted him with a cold distant bow, and a fine-lady
