Successful Recitations Part 62

"Open, open!" shout I. "What on earth is the matter?"

There is silence; then a man's voice--that is to say, my wife's voice in imitation of a man's--replies in tones of indignant ferocity, to convey the idea of a life-preserver being under the pillow of the speaker, and ready to his hand: "Who are you--what do you want?"

"You very silly woman," I answered; not from unpoliteness, but because I find that that sort of language recovers and a.s.sures her of my ident.i.ty better than any other--"why, it's I."

The door is then opened about six or seven inches, and I am admitted with all the precaution which attends the entrance of an ally into a besieged garrison.

Mrs. B., now leaning upon my shoulder, dissolves into copious tears, and points to the door communicating with my attiring-chamber.

"There's sur--sur--somebody been snoring in your dressing-room," she sobs, "all the time you were away."

This statement is a little too much for my sense of humour, and although sympathising very tenderly with poor Mrs. B., I cannot help bursting into a little roar of laughter. Laughter and fear are deadly enemies, and I can see at once that Mrs. B. is all the better for this explosion.

"Consider, my love," I reason, "consider the extreme improbability of a burglar or other nefarious person making such a use of the few precious hours of darkness as to go to sleep in them! Why, too, should he take a bedstead without a mattress, which I believe is the case in this particular supposition of yours, when there were feather-beds unoccupied in other apartments? Moreover, would not this be a still greater height of recklessness in such an individual, should he have a habit of snor----"

A slight noise in the dressing-room, occasioned by the Venetian blind tapping against the window, here causes Mrs. B. to bury her head with extreme swiftness, ostrichlike, beneath the pillow, so that the peroration of my argument is lost upon her. I enter the suspected chamber--this time with a lighted candle--and find my trousers, with the boots in them, hanging over the bedside something after the manner of a drunken marauder, but nothing more. Neither is there anybody reposing under the shadow of my boot-tree upon the floor. All is peace there, and at sixes and sevens as I left it upon retiring--as I had hoped--to rest.

Once more I stretch my chilled and tired limbs upon the couch; sweet sleep once more begins to woo my eyelids, when "Henry, Henry!" again dissolves the dim and half-formed dream.

"Are you _certain_, Henry, that you looked in the shower-bath? I am almost sure that I heard somebody pulling the string."

No grounds, indeed, are too insufficient, no supposition too incompatible with reason, for Mrs. B. to build her alarms upon.

Sometimes, although we lodge upon the second story, she imagines that the window is being attempted; sometimes, although the register may be down, she is confident that the chimney is being used as the means of ingress.

Once, when we happened to be in London--where she feels, however, a good deal safer than in the country--we had a real alarm, and Mrs.

B., since I was suffering from a quinsy, contracted mainly by my being sent about the house o' nights in the usual scanty drapery, had to be sworn in as her own special constable.

"Henry, Henry!" she whispered upon this occasion, "there's a dreadful cat in the room."

"Pooh, pooh!" I gasped; "it's only in the street; I've heard the wretches. Perhaps they are on the tiles."

"No, Henry. There, I don't want you to talk, since it makes you cough; only listen to me. What am I to do, Henry? I'll stake my existence that there's a---- Ugh, what's that?"

And, indeed, some heavy body did there and then jump upon our bed, and off again at my wife's interjection, with extreme agility. I thought Mrs. B. would have had a fit, but she didn't. She told me, dear soul, upon no account to venture into the cold with my bad throat. She would turn out the beast herself, single-handed. We arranged that she was to take hold of my fingers, and retain them, until she reached the fireplace, where she would find a shovel or other offensive weapon fit for the occasion. During the progress of this expedition, however, so terrible a caterwauling broke forth, as it seemed, from the immediate neighbourhood of the fender, that my disconcerted helpmate made a most precipitate retreat. She managed after this mishap to procure a light, and by a circuitous route, constructed of tables and chairs, to avoid stepping upon the floor, Mrs. B. obtained the desired weapon. It was then much better than a play to behold that heroic woman defying grimalkin from her eminence, and to listen to the changeful dialogue which ensued between herself and that far from dumb, though inarticulately speaking animal.

"Puss, puss, p.u.s.s.y--poor p.u.s.s.y."

"Miau, miau, miau," was the linked shrillness, long drawn out, of the feline reply.

"Poor old puss, then, was it ill? Puss, puss. Henry, the horrid beast is going to fly at me! Whist, whist, cat."

"Ps-s-s-s. ps-s-s-s, miau; ps-s-s-s-s-s-s-s," replied the other, in a voice like fat in the fire.

"My dear love," cried I, almost suffocated with a combination of laughter and quinsy; "you have never opened the door; where is the poor thing to run to?"

Mrs. B. had all this time been exciting the bewildered animal to frenzy by her conversation and shovel, without giving it the opportunity to escape, which, as soon as offered, it took advantage of with an expression of savage impatience partaking very closely indeed of the character of an oath.

This is, however, the sole instance of Mrs. B.'s having ever taken it in hand to subdue her own alarms. It is I who, ever since her marriage, have done the duty, and more than the duty, of an efficient house-dog, which before that epoch, I understand, was wont to be discharged by one of her younger sisters. Not seldom, in these involuntary rounds of mine, I have become myself the cause of alarm or inconvenience to others. Our little foot-page, with a courage beyond his years, and a spirit worthy of a better cause, very nearly transfixed me with the kitchen spit as I was trying, upon one occasion, the door of his own pantry. Upon another nocturnal expedition, I ran against a human body in the dark--that turned out to be my brother-in-law's, who was also in search of robbers--with a shock to both our nervous systems such as they have not yet recovered from. It fell to my lot, upon a third, to discover one of the rural police up in our attics, where, in spite of the increased powers lately granted to the county constabulary, I could scarcely think he was ent.i.tled to be. I once presented myself, an uninvited guest, at a select morning entertainment--it was at 1.30 A.M.--given by our hired London cook to nearly a dozen of her male and female friends. No wonder that Mrs. B. had "staked her existence" that night that she had heard the area gate "go." When I consider the extremely free and unconstrained manner in which I was received, poker and all, by that a.s.sembly, my only surprise is that they did not signify their arrivals by double knocks at the front door.

On one memorable night, and on one only, have I found it necessary to use that formidable weapon which habit has rendered as familiar to my hand as its flower to that of the Queen of Clubs.

The grey of morning had just begun to steal into our bedchamber, when Mrs. B. e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with unusual vigour, "Henry, Henry, they're in the front drawing-room; and they've just knocked down the parrot screen."

"My love," I was about to observe, "your imaginative powers have now arrived at the pitch of _clairvoyance_," when a noise from the room beneath us, as if all the fireirons had gone off together with a bang, compelled me to acknowledge, to myself at least, that there was something in Mrs. B.'s alarms at last. I trod downstairs as noiselessly as I could, and in almost utter darkness. The drawing-room door was ajar, and through the crevice I could distinguish, despite the gloom, as many as three m.u.f.fled figures.

They were all of them in black clothing, and each wore over his face a mask of c.r.a.pe, fitting quite closely to his features. I had never been confronted by anything so dreadful before. Mrs. B. had cried "Wolf!" so often that I had almost ceased to believe in wolves of this description at all. Unused to personal combat, and embarra.s.sed by the novel circ.u.mstance under which I found myself, I was standing undecided on the landing, when I caught that well-known whisper of "_Henry, Henry!_" from the upper story. The burglars caught it also.

They desisted from their occupation of examining the articles of _vertu_ upon the chimney-piece, while their fiendish countenances relaxed into a hideous grin. One of them stole cautiously towards the door where I was standing. I hear his burglarious feet, I heard the "_Henry, Henry!_" still going on from above-stairs; I heard my own heart pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat within me. It was one of those moments in which one lives a life. The head of the c.r.a.ped marauder was projected cautiously round the door, as if to listen. I poised my weapon, and brought it down with unerring aim upon his skull. He fell like a bullock beneath the axe, and I sped up to my bedchamber with all the noiselessness and celerity of a bird. It was I who locked the door this time, and piled the washhand-stand, two band-boxes, and a chair against it with the speed of lightning.

Was Mrs. B. out of her mind with terror that at such an hour as that she should indulge in a paroxysm of mirth?

"Good heavens!" I cried, "be calm, my love; there are burglars in the house at last."

"My dear Henry," she answered, laughing so that the tears quite stood in her eyes, "I am very sorry; I tried to call you back. But when I sent you downstairs, I quite forgot that this was the morning upon which I had ordered the sweeps!"

One of those gentlemen was at that moment lying underneath with his skull fractured, and it cost me fifteen pounds to get it mended, besides the expense of a new drawing-room carpet.

--_From "Humorous Stories" by James Payn. By permission of Messrs. Chatto & Windus_.

SHELTERED.

BY SARAH ORME JEWETT.

It was a cloudy, dismal day, and I was all alone, For early in the morning John Earl and Nathan Stone Came riding up the lane to say--I saw they both looked pale-- That Anderson the murderer had broken out of jail.

They only stopped a minute, to tell my man that he Must go to the four corners, where all the folks would be; They were going to hunt the country, for he only had been gone An hour or so when they missed him, that morning just at dawn.

John never finished his breakfast; he saddled the old white mare.

She seemed to know there was trouble, and galloped as free and fair And even a gait as she ever struck when she was a five-year-old: The knowingest beast we ever had, and worth her weight in gold.

He turned in the saddle and called to me--I watched him from the door-- "I shan't be home to dinner," says he, "but I'll be back by four.

I'd fasten the doors if I was you, and keep at home to-day;"

And a little chill came over me as I watched him ride away.

I went in and washed the dishes--I was sort of scary too.

We had 'ranged to go away that day. I hadn't much to do, Though I always had some sewing work, and I got it and sat down; But the old clock tick-tacked loud at me, and I put away the gown.

I thought the story over: how Anderson had been A clever, steady fellow, so far's they knew, till then.

Some said his wife had tried him, but he got to drinking hard, Till last he struck her with an axe and killed her in the yard.

The only thing I heard he said was, he was most to blame; But he fought the men that took him like a tiger. 'Twas a shame He'd got away; he ought to swing: a man that killed his wife And broke her skull in with an axe--he ought to lose his life!

Our house stood in a lonesome place, the woods were all around, But I could see for quite a ways across the open ground; I couldn't help, for the life o' me, a-looking now and then All along the edge o' the growth, and listening for the men.

I thought they would find Anderson: he couldn't run till night, For the farms were near together, and there must be a sight Of men out hunting for him; but when the clock struck three, A neighbour's boy came up with word that John had sent to me.