by Grant Allen
Next day, Nora met me casually at a confectioner’s in the High, where I will frankly confess that I was engaged in experimenting upon the relative merits of raspberry cream and lemon water ices. She gave me her hand timidly, and whispered to me half under her breath, “Papa’s so dreadfully angry, Owen, and I’m afraid I shall never be able to meet you any more, for he’s going to send me back this very afternoon to South Kensington, and keep me away from Oxford altogether in future.” I saw her eyes were red with crying, and that she really thought our little romance was entirely at an end.
“My darling Nora,” I replied in an undertone, “even South Kensington is not so unutterably remote that I shall never be able to see you there. Write to me whenever you are able, and let me know where I can write to you. My dear little Nora, if there were a hundred papas and a thousand Aunt Lydias interposed in a square between us, don’t you know we should manage all the same to love one another and to overcome all difficulties?”
Nora smiled and half cried at once, and then discreetly turned to order half a pound of glacé cherries. And that was the last that I saw of her for the time at Oxford.
During the next term or two, I’m afraid I must admit that the relations between my tutor and myself were distinctly strained, so much so as continually to threaten the breaking out of open hostilities. It wasn’t merely that Nora was in question, but the Professor also suspected me of jeering in private at his psychical investigations. And if the truth must be told, I will admit that his suspicions were not wholly without justification. It began to be whispered among the undergraduates just then that the Professor and his sister had taken to turning planchettes, interrogating easy-chairs, and obtaining interesting details about the present abode of Shakespeare or Milton from intelligent and well-informed five-o’clock tea-tables. It had long been well known that the Professor took a deep interest in haunted houses, considered that the portents recorded by Livy must have something in them, and declared himself unable to be sceptical as to facts which had convinced such great men as Plato, Seneca, and Samuel Johnson. But the table-turning was a new fad, and we noisy undergraduates occasionally amused ourselves by getting up an amateur séance, in imitation of the Professor, and eliciting psychical truths, often couched in a surprisingly slangy or even indecorous dialect, from a very lively though painfully irreverent spirit, who discoursed to us through the material intervention of a rickety what-not. However, as the only mediums we employed were the very unprofessional ones of two plain decanters, respectively containing port and sherry, the Professor (who was a teetotaler, and who paid five guineas a séance for the services of that distinguished psychical specialist, Dr. Grade) considered the interesting results we obtained as wholly beneath the dignity of scientific inquiry. He even most unworthily endeavoured to stifle research by gating us all one evening when a materialized spirit, assuming the outer form of the junior exhibitioner, sang a comic song of the period in a loud voice with the windows open, and accompanied itself noisily with a psychical tattoo on the rickety what-not. The Professor went so far as to observe sarcastically that our results appeared to him to be rather spirituous than spiritual.
On May 11, 1873 (I will endeavour to rival the Professor in accuracy and preciseness), I got a short note from dear Nora, dated from South Kensington, which I, too (though not from psychical motives), have carefully preserved. I will not publish it, however, either here or in the Society’s Proceedings, for reasons which will probably be obvious to any of my readers who happen ever to have been placed in similar circumstances themselves. Disengaging the kernel of fact from the irrelevant matter in which it was imbedded, I may state that Nora wrote me somewhat to this effect. She was going next day to the Academy with the parents of some schoolfellow; could I manage to run up to town for the day, go to the Academy myself, and meet her “quite accidentally, you know, dear,” in the Water-colour room about half-past eleven?
This was rather awkward; for next day, as it happened, was precisely the Professor’s morning for the Herodotus lecture; but circumstances like mine at that moment know no law. So I succeeded in excusing myself from attendance somehow or other (I hope truthfully) and took the nine a.m. express up to town. Shortly after eleven I was at the Academy, and waiting anxiously for Nora’s arrival. That dear little hypocrite, the moment she saw me approach, assumed such an inimitable air of infantile surprise and innocent pleasure at my unexpected appearance that I positively blushed for her wicked powers of deception.
“You here, Mr. Mansfield!” she cried in a tone of the most apparently unaffected astonishment, “why, I thought it was full term time; surely you ought to be up at Oriel.”
“So I am,” I answered, “officially; but in my private capacity I’ve come up for the day to look at the pictures.”
“Oh, how nice!” said that shocking little Nora, with a smile that was childlike and bland. “Mr. Mansfield is such a great critic, Mrs. Worplesdon; he knows all about art, and artists, and so on. He’ll be able to tell us which pictures we ought to admire, you know, and which aren’t worth looking at. Mr. Worplesdon, let me introduce you; Mrs. Worplesdon — Miss Worplesdon. How very lucky we should have happened to come across you, Mr. Mansfield!”
The Worplesdons fell immediately, like lambs, into the trap so ingenuously spread for them. Indeed, I have always noticed that ninety-nine per cent. of the British public, when turned into an art-gallery, are only too glad to accept the opinion of anybody whatsoever, who is bold enough to have one, and to express it openly. Having thus been thrust by Nora into the arduous position of critic by appointment to the Worplesdon party, I delivered myself ex cathedrâ forthwith upon the merits and demerits of the entire exhibition; and I was so successful in my critical views that I not only produced an immense impression upon Mr. Worplesdon himself, but also observed many ladies in the neighbourhood nudge one another as they gazed intently backward and forward between wall and catalogue, and heard them whisper audibly among themselves, “A gentleman here says the flesh tones on that shoulder are simply marvellous;” or, “That artist in the tweed suit behind us thinks the careless painting of the ferns in the foreground quite unworthy of such a colourist as Daubiton.” So highly was my criticism appreciated, in fact, that Mr. Worplesdon even invited me to lunch with Nora and his party at a neighbouring restaurant, where I spent the most delightful hour I had passed for the last half-year, in the company of that naughty mendacious little schemer.
About four o’clock, however, the Worplesdons departed, taking Nora with them to South Kensington; and I prepared to walk back in the direction of Paddington, meaning to catch an evening train, and return to Oxford. I was strolling in a leisurely fashion along Piccadilly towards the Park, and looking into all the photographers’ windows, when suddenly an awful apparition loomed upon me — the Professor himself, coming round the corner from Bond Street, folding up a new rhinoceros-handled umbrella as he walked along. In a moment I felt that all was lost. I was up in town without leave; the Professor would certainly see me and recognize me; he would ask me how and why I had left the University, contrary to rules; and I must then either tell him the whole truth, which would get Nora into a fearful scrape, or else run the risk of being sent down in disgrace, which might prevent me from taking a degree, and would at least cause my father and mother an immense deal of unmerited trouble.
Like a flash of lightning, a wild idea shot instantaneously across my brain. Might I pretend to be my own double? The Professor was profoundly superstitious on the subject of wraiths, apparitions, ghosts, brain-waves, and supernatural appearances generally; if I could only manage to impose upon him for a moment by doing something outrageously uncommon or eccentric, I might succeed in stifling further inquiry by setting him from the beginning on a false track which he was naturally prone to follow. Before I had time to reflect upon the consequences of my act, the wild idea had taken possession of me, body and soul, and had worked itself out in action with all the rapidity of a mad impulse. I rushed franti
cally up to the Professor, with my eyes fixed in a vacant stare on a point in space somewhere above the tops of the chimney-pots: I waved my stick three times mysteriously around his head; and then, without giving him time to recover from his surprise or to address a single word to me, I bolted off in a Red Indian dance to the nearest corner.
There was an hotel there, which I had often noticed before, though I had never entered it; and I rushed wildly in, meaning to get out as best I could when the Professor (who is very short-sighted) had passed on along Piccadilly in search of me. But fortune, as usual, favoured the bold. Luckily, it was a corner house, and, to my surprise, I found when I got inside it, that the hall opened both ways, with a door on to the side street. The porter was looking away as I entered; so I merely ran in of one door and out of the other, never stopping till I met a hansom, into which I jumped and ordered the man to drive to Paddington. I just caught the 4.35 to Oxford, and by a little over six o’clock I was in my own rooms at Oriel.
It was very wrong of me, indeed; I acknowledge it now; but the whole thing had flashed across my undergraduate mind so rapidly that I carried it out in a moment, before I could at all realize what a very foolish act I was really committing. To take a rise out of the Professor, and to save Nora an angry interview, were the only ideas that occurred to me at the second: when I began to reflect upon it afterwards, I was conscious that I had really practised a very gross and wicked deception. However, there was no help for it now; and as I rolled along in the train to Oxford, I felt that to save myself and Nora from utter disgrace, I must carry the plot out to the end without flinching. It then occurred to me that a double apparition would be more in accordance with all recognized principles of psychical manifestation than a single one. At Reading, therefore, I regret to say, I bought a pencil, and a sheet of paper, and an envelope; and before I reached Oxford station, I had written to the Professor what I now blush to acknowledge as a tissue of shocking fables, in which I paralleled every particular of my own behaviour to him by a similar imaginary piece of behaviour on his part to me, only changing the scene to Oxford. It was awfully wrong, I admit. At the time, however, being yet but little more than a schoolboy, after all, I regarded it simply in the light of a capital practical joke. I informed the Professor gravely how I had seen him at four o’clock in the Corn Market, and how astonished I was when I found him waving his green silk umbrella three times wildly, around my head.
The moment I arrived at Oxford, I dashed up to college in a hansom, and got the Professor’s address in London from the porter. He had gone up to town for the night, it seemed, probably to visit Nora, and would not be back in college till the next morning. Then I rushed down to the post-office, where I was just in time (with an extra stamp) to catch the last post for that night’s delivery. The moment the letter was in the box, I repented, and began to fear I had gone too far: and when I got back to my own rooms at last, and went down late for dinner in hall, I confess I trembled not a little, as to the possible effect of my quite too bold and palpable imposition.
Next morning by the second post I got a long letter from the Professor, which completely relieved me from all immediate anxiety as to his interpretation of my conduct. He rose to the fly with a charming simplicity which showed how delighted he was at this personal confirmation of all his own most cherished superstitions. “My dear Mansfield,” his letter began, “now hear what, at the very self-same hour and minute, happened to me in Piccadilly.” In fact, he had swallowed the whole thing entire, without a single moment’s scepticism or hesitation.
From what I heard afterwards, it was indeed a lucky thing for me that I had played him this shocking trick, for Nora believes he was then actually on his way to South Kensington on purpose to forbid her most stringently from holding any further communication with me in any way. But as soon as this mysterious event took place, he began to change his mind about me altogether. So remarkable an apparition could not have happened except for some good and weighty reason, he argued: and he suspected that the reason might have something to do with my intentions towards Nora. Why, when he was on his way to warn her against me, should a vision, bearing my outer and bodily shape, come straight across his path, and by vehement signs of displeasure, endeavour to turn him from his purpose, unless it were clearly well for Nora that my attentions should not be discouraged?
From that day forth the Professor began to ask me to his rooms and address me far more cordially than he used to do before: he even, on the strength of my singular adventure, invited me to assist at one or two of his psychical séances. Here, I must confess, I was not entirely successful: the distinguished medium complained that I exerted a repellent effect upon the spirits, who seemed to be hurt by my want of generous confidence in their good intentions, and by my suspicious habit of keeping my eyes too sharply fixed upon the legs of the tables. He declared that when I was present, an adverse influence seemed to pervade the room, due, apparently, to my painful lack of spiritual sympathies. But the Professor condoned my failure in the regular psychical line, in consideration of my brilliant success as a beholder of wraiths and visions. After I took my degree that summer, he used all his influence to procure me the post of keeper of the Accadian Antiquities at the Museum, for which my previous studies had excellently fitted me: and by his friendly aid I was enabled to obtain the post, though I regret to say that, in spite of his credulity in supernatural matters, he still refuses to believe in the correctness of my conjectural interpretation of the celebrated Amalekite cylinders imported by Mr. Ananias, which I have deciphered in so very simple and satisfactory a manner. As everybody knows, my translation may be regarded as perfectly certain, if only one makes the very modest assumption that the cylinders were originally engraved upside down by an Aztec captive, who had learned broken Accadian, with a bad accent, from a Chinese exile, and who occasionally employed Egyptian hieroglyphics in incorrect senses, to piece out his own very imperfect idiom and doubtful spelling of the early Babylonian language. The solitary real doubt in the matter is whether certain extraordinary marks in the upper left-hand corner of the cylinder are to be interpreted as accidental scratches, or as a picture representing the triumph of a king over seven bound prisoners, or, finally, as an Accadian sentence in cuneiforms which may be translated either as “To the memory of Om the Great,” or else as “Pithor the High Priest dedicates a fat goose to the family dinner on the 25th of the month of mid winter.” Every candid and unprejudiced mind must admit that these small discrepancies or alternatives in the opinions of experts can cast no doubt at all upon the general soundness of the method employed. But persons like the Professor, while ready to accept any evidence at all where their own prepossessions are concerned, can never be induced to believe such plain and unvarnished statements of simple scientific knowledge.
However, the end of it all was that before I had been a month at the Museum, I had obtained the Professor’s consent to my marriage with Nora: and as I had had Nora’s own consent long before, we were duly joined together in holy matrimony early in October at Oxford, and came at once to live in Hampstead. So, as it turned out, I finally owed the sweetest and best little wife in all Christendom to the mysterious occurrence in Piccadilly.
CARVALHO.
I.
The first time I ever met Ernest Carvalho was just before the regimental dance at Newcastle. I had ridden up the Port Royal mountains that same morning from our decaying sugar estate in the Liguanca plain, and I was to stop in cantonments with the Major’s wife, fat little Mrs. Venn, who had promised my mother that she would undertake to chaperon me to this my earliest military party. I won’t deny that I looked forward to it immensely, for I was then a girl of only eighteen, fresh out from school in England, where I had been living away from our family ever since I was twelve years old. Dear mamma was a Jamaican lady of the old school, completely overpowered by the ingrained West Indian indolence; and if I had waited to go to a dance till I could get her to accompany me, I might have waited till Doomsday,
or probably later. So I was glad enough to accept fat little Mrs. Venn’s proffered protection, and to go up the hills on my sure-footed mountain pony; while Isaac, the black stable-boy, ran up behind me carrying on his thick head the small portmanteau that contained my plain white ball-dress.
As I went up the steep mountain-path alone — for ladies ride only with such an unmounted domestic escort in Jamaica — I happened to overtake a tall gentleman with a handsome rather Jewish face and a pair of extremely lustrous black eyes, who was mounted on a beautiful chestnut mare just in front of me. The horse-paths in the Port Royal mountains are very narrow, being mere zigzag ledges cut half-way up the precipitous green slopes of fern and club-moss, so that there is seldom room for two horses to pass abreast, and it is necessary to wait at some convenient corner whenever you see another rider coming in the opposite direction. At the first opportunity the tall Jewish-looking gentleman drew aside in such a corner, and waited for me to pass. “Pray don’t wait,” I said, as soon as I saw what he meant; “your horse will get up faster than my pony, and if I go in front I shall keep you back unnecessarily.”
“Not at all,” he answered, raising his hat gracefully; “you are a stranger in the hills, I see. It is the rule of these mountain-paths always to give a lady the lead. If I go first and my mare breaks into a canter on a bit of level, your pony will try to catch her up on the steep slopes, and that is always dangerous.”
Seeing he did not intend to move till I did, I waived the point at last and took the lead. From that moment I don’t know what on earth came over my lazy old pony. He refused to go at more than a walk, or at best a jog-trot, the whole way to Newcastle. Now the rise from the plain to the cantonments is about four thousand feet, I think (I am a dreadfully bad hand at remembering figures), and the distance can’t be much less, I suppose, than seven miles. During all that time you never see a soul, except a few negro pickaninnies playing in the dustheaps, not a human habitation, except a few huts embowered in mangoes, hibiscus-bushes, and tree-ferns. At first we kept a decorous silence, not having been introduced to one another; but the stranger’s mare followed close at my pony’s heels, pull her in as he would, and it seemed really too ridiculous to be solemnly pacing after one another, single file, in this way for a couple of hours, without speaking a word, out of pure punctiliousness. So at last we broke the ice, and long before we got to Newcastle we had struck up quite an acquaintance with one another. It is wonderful how well two people can get mutually known in the course of two hours’ tête-à-tête, especially under such peculiar circumstances. You are just near enough to one another for friendly chat, and yet not too near for casual strangers. And then Isaac with the portmanteau behind was quite sufficient escort to satisfy the convenances. In England, one’s groom would have to be mounted, which always seems to me, in my simplicity, a distinction without a difference.