An Old Meerschaum Part 1

An Old Meerschaum.

by David Christie Murray.

CHAPTER I.

The market-place at Trieste lay in a blaze of colour under the June sunlight. The scent of fruits and flowers was heavy on the air. A faint-hearted breeze which scarcely dared to blow came up from the harbour now and again, and made the heat just bearable. Mr. William Holmes Barndale, of Barndale in the county of Surrey, and King's Bench Walk-, Temple, sat in shadow in front of a restaurant with his legs comfortably thrust forth and his hat tilted over his eyes. He pulled his tawny beard lazily with one hand, and with the other caressed a great tumbler of iced beer. He was beautifully happy in his perfect idleness, and a sense was upon him of the eternal fitness of things in general.

In the absolute serenity of his beat.i.tude he fell asleep, with one hand still lazily clutching his beard, and the other still lingering lovingly near the great tumbler. This was surely not surprising, and on the face of things it would not have seemed that there was any reason for blus.h.i.+ng at him. Yet a young lady, unmistakably English and undeniably pretty, gave a great start, beholding him, and blushed celestial rosy red. She was pa.s.sing along the shady side of the square with papa and mamma, and the start and the blush came in with some hurried commonplace in answer to a commonplace. These things, papa and mamma noted not--good, easy, rosy, wholesome people, who had no great trouble in keeping their heads clear of fancies, and were chiefly engaged just then with devices for keeping cool.

Two minutes later, or thereabouts, came that way a young gentleman of whom the pretty young lady seemed a refined and feminine copy, save and except that the young lady was dearly and daintily demure, whilst from this youth impudence and mischief shone forth as light radiates from a lantern. He, pausing before the sleeping Barndale, blushed not, but poked him in the ribs with the end of his walking-stick, and regarded him with an eye of waggish joy, as who should say that to poke a sleeping man in the ribs was a stroke of comic genius whereof the world had never beheld the like. He sat on his stick, c.o.c.ked Mr. Barndale's hat on one side, and awaited that gentleman's waking. Mr. Barndale, languidly stretching himself, arose, adjusted his hat, took a great drink of iced beer, and, being thereby in some degree primed for conversation, spoke.

'That you, Jimmy?' said Mr. Barndale.

'Billy, my boy?' said the awakener, 'how are you?'

'Thought you were in Oude, or somewhere,' said Mr. Barndale.

'Been back six months,' the other answered.

'Anybody with you here?'

'Yes,' said the awakener, 'the Mum, the Pater, and the Kid.'

Mr. Barndale did not look like the sort of man to be vastly shocked at these terms of irreverence, yet it is a fact that his brown and bearded cheeks flushed like any schoolgirl's.

'Stopping at the Hotel de la Ville,' said the awakener, 'and adoing of the Grand Tower, my pippin. I'm playing cicerone. Come up and have a smoke and a jaw.'

'All right,' said Mr. Barndale languidly. n.o.body, to look at him now, would have guessed how fast his heart beat, and how every nerve in his body fluttered. 'I'm at the same place. When did you come?'

'Three hours ago. We're going on to Constantinople. Boat starts at six.'

'Ah!' said Barndale placidly. '_I'm_ going on to Constantinople too.'

'Now that's what I call jolly,' said the other. 'You're going to-night of course?'

'Of course. Nothing to stay here for.'

At the door of the hotel stood Barndale's servant, a sober-looking Scotchman dressed in dark tweed.

'Come with me, Bob,' said Barndale as he pa.s.sed him. 'See you in the coffee-room in five minutes, Jimmy.'

In his own room Barndale sat down upon the bedside and addressed his servant.

'I have changed my mind about going home. Go to Lloyd's office and take places for this evening's boat to Constantinople. Wait a bit. Let me see what the fare is. There you are. Pack up and get everything down to the boat and wait there until I come.'

The man disappeared, and Barndale joined his friend. He had scarce seated himself when a feminine rustling was heard outside. The door opened, a voice of singular sweetness cried, 'Jimmy, dear!' and a young lady entered. It was the young lady who blushed and started when she saw Barndale asleep in front of the restaurant. She blushed again, but held her hand frankly out to him. He rose and took it with more tenderness than he knew of. The eyes of the third person twinkled, and he winked at his own reflection in a mirror.

'This,' Barndale said, 'is not an expected pleasure, and is all the greater on that account. By a curious coincidence I find we are travelling together to Constantinople.'

Her hand still lingered in his whilst he said this, and as he ceased to speak he gave it a little farewell pressure. Her sweet hazel eyes quite beamed upon him, and she returned the pressure cordially. But she answered only--

'Papa will be very pleased,'

'Isn't it singular,' said the guilty Barndale with an air of commonplace upon him, 'that we should all be making this journey together?'

'Very singular indeed,' said pretty Miss Le-land, with so bright a sparkle of mirth in those demure hazel eyes that Barndale, without knowing why, felt himself confounded.

Mr. James Leland winked once more at his reflection in the mirror, and was discovered in the act by Barndale, who became signally disconcerted in manner.

Miss Leland relieved his embarra.s.sment by taking away her brother for a conference respecting the package of certain treasures purchased a day or two before in Venice. The lone one smoked, and lounged, and waited.

He tried to read, and gave it up. He strayed down to the harbour, and, finding his servant solemnly mounting guard over his luggage on board the boat, he himself went aboard and in-spected his berth, and chatted with the steward, in whom he discovered an old acquaintance.

But the time went drearily; and Barndale, who was naturally a man to be happy under all sorts of circ.u.mstances, suffered all the restlessness, chagrin, and envy with which love in certain of its stages has power to disturb the spirit. He had made up a most heroic mind on this question of Miss Leland some three months ago, and had quite decided that she did not care for him. He wasn't going to break his heart for a woman who didn't care for him. Not he.

If she be not fair for me, What care I how fair she be?

She had made fun of him in her own demure way. He ventured once on a little touch of sentiment, which she never neglected to repeat, when opportunity offered, in his presence. She repeated it with so serious an air, so precisely as if it were an original notion which had just then occurred to her, that Barndale winced under it every time she used it.

His mind was quite made up on this matter. He would go away and forget her. He believed she liked him, in a friendly sisterly sort of way, and that made him feel more hopeless. There were evidences enough to convince you or me, had we been there to watch them, that this young lady was caught in the toils of love quite as inextricably as this young gentleman; but, with the pigheaded obstinacy and stupidity incident to his condition, he declined to see it, and voluntarily betook himself to misery, after the manner of young men in love from time immemorial. A maiden who can be caught without chasing is pretty generally not worth catching; and cynics have been known to say that the pleasure of stalking your bride is perhaps the best part of matrimony. This our young Barndale would not have believed. He believed, rather, that the tender hopes and chilling fears of love were among the chief pains of life, and would have laughed grimly if anyone had prophesied that he would ever look back to them with longing regret. We, who are wiser, will not commiserate but envy this young gentleman, remembering the time when those tender hopes and chilling fears were ours--when we were happier in our miseries than we have now the power to be in our joys.

The Lelands came at last, and Barndale had got the particular form of love's misery which he most coveted. The old gentleman was cordial, the old lady was effusive, the awakener was what he had always been, and Lilian was what she had always been to Barndale--a bewildering maddening witchery, namely, which set him fairly beside himself. Let it not be prejudicial to him in your judgment that you see him for the first time under these foolish circ.u.mstances. Under other conditions you would find much to admire in him. Even now, if you have any taste for live statuary, you shall admire this upright six feet two inches of finely-modelled bone and muscle. If manly good-nature can make a handsome sun-browned face pleasant to you, then shall Barndale's countenance find favour in your eyes. Of his manly ways, his good and honest heart, this story will tell you something, though perchance not much. If you do not like Barndale before you part with him, believe me, it is my fault, who tell his story clumsily, and not his. For the lady of his love there might be more to say, if I were one of those clever people who read women. As it is, you shall make your own reading of her, and shall dislike her on your own personal responsibility, or love her for her transparent merits, and for the sake of no stupid a.n.a.lysis of mine.

Do you know the Adriatic? It pleases me to begin a love story over its translucent sapphire and under its heavenly skies. I shall rejoice again in its splendours as I hover in fancy over these two impressionable young hearts, to whom a new glamour lives upon its beauties.

Papa and Mamma Leland are placidly asleep on the saloon deck, beneath the flapping awning. Leland Junior is carrying on a p.r.o.nounced flirtation with a little Greek girl, and Lilian and Barndale are each enjoying their own charming spiritual discomforts. They say little, but, like the famous parrot, they think the more. Concerning one thing, however, Mr. Barndale thinks long and deeply, pulling his tawny beard meanwhile. Lilian, gazing with placid-seeming spirit on the deep, is apparently startled by the suddenness of his address.

'Miss Leland!'

'How you startled me!' she answers, turning her hazel eyes upon him. She has been waiting these last five minutes for him to speak, and knew that he was about it. But take notice that these small deceits in the gentle s.e.x are natural, and by no means immoral.

'I am disturbed in mind,' says Barndale, blus.h.i.+ng a httle behind his bronze, 'about an incident of yesterday.'

'Conscience,' says Lilian, calmly didactic, 'will a.s.sert herself occasionally.'

'Conscience,' says Barndale, blus.h.i.+ng a httle more perceptibly, 'has httle to do with this disturbance. Why did you laugh when I said that it was singular that we should be making this pleasant journey together?'

'Did I laugh?' she asked demurely. Then quite suddenly, and with an air of denunciation.

'Ask James.'

Barndale rises obediently.

'No, no,' says the lady. 'Sit down, Mr. Barndale. I was only joking.

There was no reason.' And now the young lady is blus.h.i.+ng. 'Did I really laugh?'

'You smiled,' says the guilty Barndale. 'At what?' inquires she with innocent inadvertency.

'Oh!' cries the young fellow, laughing outright, 'that is too bad. Why _did_ you laugh when I said it was singular?'

'I am not prepared,' she answers, 'to account for all my smiles of yesterday.'