More Bywords

‘Look at the signature.’

‘Oh! oh! oh!’—and she dropped into a chair.  ‘The horrible man!  That’s the autograph I gave him this afternoon.’

‘You are sure?’

‘Quite; for my pen spluttered in the slope of the A.  Has she gone and given it to him?’

‘No.  She brought it to me, and set the policeman to watch him.’

‘What a dear, good woman!  Shall you send him to prison, Admiral Merrifield?  What can be done to him?’ said Arthurine, not looking at all as if she would like to abrogate capital punishment.

‘Well, I had been thinking,’ said the Admiral.  ‘You see he did not get it, and though I could commit him for endeavouring to obtain money on false pretences, I very much doubt whether the prosecution would not be worse for you than for him.’

‘That is very kind of you, Admiral!’ exclaimed the mother.  ‘It would be terribly awkward for dear Arthurine to stand up and say he cajoled her into giving her autograph.  It might always be remembered against her!’

‘Exactly so,’ said the Admiral; ‘and perhaps there may be another reason for not pushing the matter to extremity.  The man is a stranger here, I believe.’

‘He has been staying at Bonchamp,’ said Mrs. Arthuret.  ‘It was young Mr. Mytton who brought him over this afternoon.’

‘Just so.  And how did he come to be aware that Mrs. Rudden owed you any money?’

There was a pause, then Arthurine broke out—

‘Oh, Daisy and Pansy can’t have done anything; but they were all three there helping me mark the tennis-courts when the message came.’

‘Including the brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘He is a bad fellow, and I would not wish to shield him in any way, but that such a plot should be proved against him would be a grievous disgrace to the family.’

‘I can’t ever feel about them as I have done,’ said Arthurine, in tears.  ‘Daisy and Pansy said so much about poor dear Fred, and every one being hard on him, and his feeling my good influence—and all the time he was plotting this against me, with my chalk in his hand marking my grass,’ and she broke down in child-like sobs.

The mortification was terrible of finding her pinnacle of fame the mere delusion of a sharper, and the shock of shame seemed to overwhelm the poor girl.

‘Oh, Admiral!’ cried her mother, ‘she cannot bear it.  I know you will be good, and manage it so as to distress her as little as possible, and not have any publicity.’

‘1 will do my best,’ said the Admiral.  ‘I will try and get a confession out of him, and send him off, though it is a pity that such a fellow should get off scot-free.’

‘Oh, never mind, so that my poor Arthurine’s name is not brought forward!  We can never be grateful enough for your kindness.’

It was so late that the Admiral did not come back that night, and the ladies were at breakfast when he appeared again.  Foxholm had, on finding there was no escape, confessed the fraud, but threw most of the blame on Fred Mytton, who was in debt, not only to him but to others.  Foxholm himself seemed to have been an adventurer, who preyed on young men at the billiard-table, and had there been in some collusion with Fred, though the Admiral had little doubt as to which was the greater villain.  He had been introduced to the Mytton family, who were not particular; indeed, Mr. Mytton had no objection to increasing his pocket-money by a little wary, profitable betting and gambling on his own account.  However, the associates had no doubt brought Bonchamp to the point of being too hot to hold them, and Fred, overhearing the arrangement with Mrs. Rudden, had communicated it to him—whence the autograph trick.  Foxholm was gone, and in the course of the day it was known that young Mytton was also gone.

The Admiral promised that none of his family should mention the matter, and that he would do his best to silence Mrs. Rudden, who for that matter probably believed the whole letter to have been forged, and would not enter into the enthusiasm of autographs.

‘Oh, thank you!  It is so kind,’ said the mother; and Arthurine, who looked as if she had not slept all night, and was ready to burst into tears on the least provocation, murmured something to the same effect, which the Admiral answered, half hearing—

‘Never mind, my dear, you will be wiser another time; young people will be inexperienced.’

‘Is that the cruellest cut of all?’ thought Miss Elmore, as she beheld her former pupil scarcely restraining herself enough for the farewell civilities, and then breaking down into a flood of tears.

Her mother hovered over her with, ‘What is it?  Oh! my dear child, you need not be afraid; he is so kind!’

‘I hate people to be kind, that is the very thing,’ said Arthurine,—‘Oh!  Miss Elmore, don’t go!—while he is meaning all the time that I have made such a fool of myself!  And he is glad, I know he is, he and his hateful, stupid, stolid daughters.’

‘My dear! my dear!’ exclaimed her mother.

‘Well, haven’t they done nothing but thwart me, whatever I wanted to do, and aren’t they triumphing now in this abominable man’s treachery, and my being taken in?  I shall go away, and sell the place, and never come back again.’

‘I should think that was the most decided way of confessing a failure,’ said Miss Elmore; and as Mrs. Arthuret was called away by the imperative summons to the butcher, she spoke more freely.  ‘Your mother looks terrified at being so routed up again.’

‘Oh, mother will be happy anywhere; and how can I stay with these stick-in-the-mud people, just like what I have read about?’

‘And have gibbeted!  Really, Arthurine, I should call them very generous!’

‘It is their thick skins,’ muttered she; ‘at least so the Myttons said; but, indeed, I did not mean to be so personal as it was thought.’

‘But tell me.  Why did you not get on with Mesa?’

‘That was a regular take-in.  Not to tell one!  When I began my German class, she put me out with useless explanations.’

‘What kind of explanations?’

‘Oh, about the Swiss being under the Empire, or something, and she would go into parallels of Saxon words, and English poetry, such as our Fraülein never troubled us with.  But I showed her it would not do.’

‘So instead of learning what you had not sense to appreciate, you wanted to teach your old routine.’

‘But, indeed, she could not pronounce at all well, and she looked ever so long at difficult bits, and then she even tried to correct me.’

‘Did she go on coming after you silenced her?’

‘Yes, and never tried to interfere again.’

‘I am afraid she drew her own conclusions about High Schools.’

‘Oh, Miss Elmore, you used to like us to be thorough and not discursive, and how could anybody brought up in this stultifying place, ages ago, know what will tell in an exam?’

‘Oh! Arthurine.  How often have I told you that examinations are not education.  I never saw so plainly that I have not educated you.’

‘I wanted to prepare Daisy and Pansy, and they didn’t care about her prosing when we wanted to get on with the book.’

‘Which would have been the best education for them, poor girls, an example of courtesy, patience, and humility, or getting on, as you call it?’

‘Oh! Miss Elmore, you are very hard on me, when I have just been so cruelly disappointed.’

‘My dear child, it is only because I want you to discover why you have been so cruelly disappointed.’

It would be wearisome to relate all that Arthurine finally told of those thwartings by the Merrifields which had thrown her into the arms of the Mytton family, nor how Miss Elmore brought her to confess that each scheme was either impracticable, or might have been injurious, and that a little grain of humility might have made her see things very differently.  Yet it must be owned that the good lady felt rather like bending a bow that would spring back again.