"We have Ernest Le Breton down here now," Oswald wrote, "on a holiday from the Exmoors", and you may be surprised to hear that I shall probably have him sooner or later for a brother-in-law. He has proposed to and been accepted by my sister Edith; and though it is likely, as things stand at present, to be a rather long engagement (for Le Breton has nothing to marry upon), we are all very much pleased about it here at Calcombe. He is just the exact man I should wish my sister to marry; so pleasant and good and clever, and so very well connected. Felicitate us, my dear Berkeley!"
Arthur Berkeley laid the letter down with a quiet sigh, and folded his hands despondently before him. He hadn"t seen very much of Edie, yet the disappointment was to him a very bitter one. It had been a pleasant day-dream, truly, and he was both to part with it so unexpectedly. "Poor little Miss b.u.t.terfly," he said to himself, tenderly and compa.s.sionately; "poor, airy, flitting, bright-eyed little Miss b.u.t.terfly. I must give you up, must I, and Ernest Le Breton must take you for better, for worse, must he? La reyne le veult, it seems, and her word is law. I"m afraid he"s hardly the man to make you happy, little lady; kind-hearted, well-meaning, but too much in earnest, too much absorbed in his ideas of right for a world where right"s impossible, and every man for himself is the wretched sordid rule of existence. He will overshadow and darken your bright little life, I fear me; not intentionally--he couldn"t do that--but by his Quixotic fads and fancies; good fads, honest fads, but fads wholly impracticable in this jarring universe of clashing interests, where he who would swim must keep his own head steadily above water, and he who minds his neighbour must sink like lead to the unfathomable bottom. He will sink, I doubt not, poor little Miss b.u.t.terfly; he will sink inevitably, and drag you down with him, down, down, down to immeasurable depths of poverty and despair. Oh, my poor little b.u.t.terfly, I"m sorry for you, and sorry for myself. It was a pretty dream, and I loved it dearly.
I had made you a queen in my fancy, and throned you in my heart, and now I have to dethrone you again, me miserable, and have my poor lonely heart bare and queenless!"
The piano was open, and he went over to it instinctively, strumming a few wild bars out of his own head, made up hastily on the spur of the moment. "No, not dethrone you," he went on, leaning back on the music-stool, and letting his hand wander aimlessly over the keys; "not dethrone you; I shall never, never be able to do that.
Little Miss b.u.t.terfly, your image is stamped there too deep for dethronement, stamped there for ever, indelibly, ineffaceably, not to be washed out by tears or laughter. Ernest Le Breton may take you and keep you; you are his; you have chosen him, and you have chosen in most things not unwisely, for he"s a good fellow and true (let me be generous in the hour of disappointment even to the rival, the goggle-eyed impracticable dragon monstrosity), but you are mine, too, for I won"t give you up; I can"t give you up; I must live for you still, even if you know it not. Little woman, I will work for you and I will watch over you; I will be your earthly Providence; I will try to extricate you from the quagmires into which the well-meaning, short-sighted dragon will infallibly lead you. Dear little bright soul, my heart aches for you; I know the trouble you are bringing upon yourself; but la reyne le veult, and it is not your humble servitor"s business to interfere with your royal pleasure. Still, you are mine, for I am yours; yours, body and soul; what else have I to live for? The dear old Progenitor can"t be with us many years longer; and when he is gone there will be nothing left me but to watch over little Miss b.u.t.terfly and her Don Quixote of a future husband. A man can"t work and slave and compose sonatas for himself alone--the idea"s disgusting, piggish, worthy only of Herbert Le Breton; I must do what I can for the little queen, and for her balloon-navigating Utopian Ernest. Thank heaven, no law prevents you from loving in your own heart the one woman whom you have once loved, no matter who may chance to marry her. Go, day-dream, fly, vanish, evaporate; the solid core remains still--my heart, and little Miss b.u.t.terfly. I have loved her once, and I shall love her, I shall love her for ever!"
He crumpled the letter up in his fingers, and flung it half angrily into the waste-paper basket, as though it were the embodied day-dream he was mentally apostrophising. It was sermon-day, and he had to write his discourse that very afternoon. A quaint idea seized him.
"Aha," he said, almost gaily, in his volatile irresponsible fashion, "I have my text ready; the hour brings it to me unsought; a quip, a quip! I shall preach on the Pool of Bethesda: "While I am coming, another steppeth down before me." The verse seems as if it were made on purpose for me; what a pity n.o.body else will understand it!" And he smiled quietly at the conceit, as he got the scented sheets of sermon-paper out of his little sandalwood davenport.
For Arthur Berkeley was one of those curiously compounded natures which can hardly ever be perfectly serious, and which can enjoy a quaintness or a neat literary allusion even at a moment of the bitterest personal disappointment. He could solace himself for a minute for the loss of Edie by choosing a text for his Sunday"s sermon with a prettily-turned epigram on his own position.
CHAPTER XII.
THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY.
At the very top of the winding footpath cut deeply into the sandstone side of the East Cliff Hill at Hastings, a wooden seat, set a little back from the road, invites the panting climber to rest for five minutes after his steep ascent from the primitive fisher village of Old Hastings, which nestles warmly in the narrow sun-smitten gulley at his feet. On this seat, one bright July morning, Herbert Le Breton lay at half length, basking in the brilliant open sunshine and evidently waiting for somebody whom he expected to arrive by the side path from the All Saints" Valley. Even the old coastguardsman, plodding his daily round over to Ecclesbourne, noticed the obvious expectation implied in his attentive att.i.tude, and ventured to remark, in his cheery familiar fashion, "She won"t be long a-comin"
now, sir, you may depend upon it: the gals is sure to be out early of a fine mornin" like this "ere." Herbert stuck his double eye-gla.s.s gingerly upon the tip of his nose, and surveyed the bluff old sailor through it with a stony British stare of mingled surprise and indignation, which drove the poor man hastily off, with a few muttered observations about some people being so confounded stuck up that they didn"t even understand the point of a little good-natured seafarin" banter.
As the coastguardsman disappeared round the corner of the flagstaff, a young girl came suddenly into sight by the jutting edge of sandstone bluff near the High Wickham; and Herbert, jumping up at once from his reclining posture, raised his bat to her with stately politeness, and moved forward in his courtly graceful manner to meet her as she approached. "Well, Selah," he said, taking her hand a little warmly (judged at least by Herbert Le Breton"s usual standard), "so you"ve come at last! I"ve been waiting here for you for fully half an hour. You see, I"ve come down to Hastings again as I promised, the very first moment I could possibly get away from my pressing duties at Oxford."
The girl withdrew her hand from his, blushing deeply, but looking into his face with evident pleasure and admiration. She was tall and handsome, with a certain dashing air of queenliness about her, too; and she was dressed in a brave, outspoken sort of finery, which, though cheap enough in its way, was neither common nor wholly wanting in a touch of native good taste and even bold refinement of contrast and harmony. "It"s very kind of you to come, Mr. Walters,"
she answered in a firm but delicate voice. "I"m so sorry I"ve kept you waiting. I got your letter, and tried to come in time; but father he"s been more aggravating than usual, almost, this morning, and kept saying he"d like to know what on earth a young woman could want to go out walking for, instead of stopping at home at her work and minding her Bible like a proper Christian. In HIS time young women usen"t to be allowed to go walking except on Sundays, and then only to chapel or Bible cla.s.s. So I"ve not been able to get away till this very minute, with all this bundle of tracts, too, to give to the excursionists on the way. Father feels a most incomprehensible interest, somehow, in the future happiness of the Sunday excursionists."
"I wish he"d feel a little more interest in the present happiness of his own daughter," Herbert said smiling. "But it hasn"t mattered your keeping me waiting here, Selah. Of course I"d have enjoyed it all far better in your society--I don"t think I need tell you that now, dear--but the sunshine, and the sea breeze, and the song of the larks, and the plash of the waves below, and the shouts of the fishermen down there on the beach mending their nets and putting out their smacks, have all been so delightful after our humdrum round of daily life at Oxford, that I only wanted your presence here to make it all into a perfect paradise.--Why, Selah, how pretty you look in that sweet print! It suits your complexion admirably.
I never saw you wear anything before so perfectly becoming."
Selah drew herself up with the conscious pride of an unaffected pretty girl. "I"m so glad you think so, Mr. Walters," she said, playing nervously with the handle of her dark-blue parasol. "You always say such very flattering things."
"No, not flattering," Herbert answered, smiling; "not flattering, Selah, simply truthful. You always extort the truth from me with your sweet face, Selah. n.o.body can look at it and not forget the stupid conventions of ordinary society. But please, dear, don"t call me Mr. Walters. Call me Herbert. You always do, you know, when you write to me."
"But it"s so much harder to do it to your face, Mr. Walters," Selah said, again blushing. "Every time you go away I say to myself, "I shall call him Herbert as soon as ever he comes back again;" and every time you come back, I feel too much afraid of you, the moment I see you, ever to do it. And yet of course I ought to, you know, for when we"re married, why, naturally, then I shall have to learn to call you Herbert, shan"t I?"
"You will, I suppose," Herbert answered, rather chillily: "but that subject is one upon which we shall be able to form a better opinion when the time comes for actually deciding it. Meanwhile, I want you to call me Herbert, if you please, as a personal favour and a mark of confidence. Suppose I were to go on calling you Miss Briggs all the time! a pretty sort of thing that would be! what inference would you draw as to the depth of my affection? Well, now, Selah, how have these dreadful home authorities of yours been treating you, my dear girl, all the time since I last saw you?"
"Much the same as usual, Mr. Walters--Herbert, I mean," Selah answered, hastily correcting herself. "The regular round. Prayers; clean the shop; breakfast, with a chapter; serve in the shop all morning; dinner, with a chapter; serve in the shop all afternoon; tea, with a chapter; prayer meeting in the evening; supper, with a chapter; exhortation; and go to bed, sick of it all, to get up next morning and repeat the entire performance da capo, as they always say in the music to the hymn-books. Occasional relaxations,--Sunday at chapel three times, and Wednesday evening Bible cla.s.s; mothers"
a.s.sembly, Dorcas society, missionary meeting, lecture on the Holy Land, dissolving views of Jerusalem, and Primitive Methodist district conference in the Mahanaim Jubilee meeting hall. Salvation privileges every day and all the year round, till I"m ready to drop with it, and begin to wish I"d only been lucky enough to have been born one of those happy benighted little pagans in a heathen land where they don"t know the value of the precious Sabbath, and haven"t yet been taught to build Primitive Methodist district chapels for crushing the lives out of their sons and daughters!"
Herbert smiled a gentle smile of calm superiority at this vehement outburst of natural irreligion. "You must certainly be bored to death with it all, Selah," he said, laughingly. "What a funny sort of creed it really is, after all, for rational beings! Who on earth could believe that the religion these people use to render your life so absolutely miserable is meant for the same thing as the one that makes my poor dear brother Ronald so perfectly and inexpressibly serene and happy? The formalism of lower natures, like your father"s, has turned it into a machine for crushing all the spontaneity out of your existence. What a regime for a high-spirited girl like you to be compelled to live under, Selah!"
"It is, it is!" Selah answered, vehemently. "I wish you could only see the way father goes on at me all the time about chapel, and so on, Mr. Wal--Herbert, I mean. You wouldn"t wonder, if you were to hear him, at my being anxious for the time to come when you can leave Oxford and we can get comfortably married. What between the drudgery of the shop and the drudgery of the chapel my life"s positively getting almost worn out of me."
Herbert took her hand in his, quietly. It was not a very small hand, but it was prettily, though cheaply, gloved, and the plain silver bracelet that encircled the wrist, though simple and inexpensive, was not wanting in rough tastefulness. "You"re a bad philosopher, Selah," he said, turning with her along the path towards Ecclesbourne; "you"re always anxious to hurry on too fast the lagging wheels of an unknown future. After all, how do you know whether we should be any the happier if we were really and truly married? Don"t you know what Swinburne says, in "Dolores"--you"ve read it in the Poems and Ballads I gave you--
Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives, And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives?"
"I"ve read it," Selah answered, carelessly, "and I thought it all very pretty. Of course Swinburne always is very pretty: but I"m sure I never try to discover what on earth he means by it. I suppose father would say I don"t read him tearfully and prayerfully--at any rate, I"m quite sure I never understand what he"s driving at."
"And yet he"s worth understanding," Herbert answered in his clear musical voice--"well worth understanding, Selah, especially for you, dearest. If, in imitation of obsolete fashions, you wished to read a few verses of some improving volume every night and morning, as a sort of becoming religious exercise in the elements of self-culture, I don"t know that I could recommend you a better book to begin upon than the Poems and Ballads. Don"t you see the moral of those four lines I"ve just quoted to you? Why should we wish to change from anything so free and delightful and poetical as lovers into anything so fettered, and commonplace, and prosaic, and Ba.n.a.l, as wives and husbands? Why should we wish to give up the fanciful paradise of fluttering hope and expectation for the dreary reality of housekeeping and cold mutton on Mondays? Why should we not be satisfied with the real pleasure of the pa.s.sing moment, without for ever torturing our souls about the imaginary but delusive pleasure of the unrealisable, impossible future?"
"But we MUST get married some time or other, Herbert," Selah said, turning her big eyes full upon him with a doubtful look of interrogation. "We can"t go on courting in this way for ever and ever, without coming to any definite conclusion. We MUST get married by-and-by, now mustn"t we?"
"Je n"en vois pas la necessite, moi," Herbert answered with just a trace of cynicism in his curling lip. "I don"t see any MUST about it, that is to say, in English, Selah. The fact is, you see, I"m above all things a philosopher; you"re a philosopher, too, but only an instinctive one, and I want to make your instinctive philosophy a.s.sume a rather more rational and extrinsic shape. Why should we really be in any hurry to go and get married? Do the actual married people of our acquaintance, as a matter of fact, seem so very much more ethereally happy--with their eight children to be washed and dressed and schooled daily, for example--than the lovers, like you and me, who walk arm-in-arm out here in the sunshine, and haven"t yet got over their delicious first illusions? Depend upon it, the longer you can keep your illusions the better. You haven"t read Aristotle in all probability; but as Aristotle would put it, it isn"t the end that is anything in love-making, it"s the energy, the active pursuit, the momentary enjoyment of it. I suppose we shall have to get married some day, Selah, though I don"t know when; but I confess to you I don"t look forward to the day quite so rapturously as you do. Shall we feel more the thrill of possession, do you think, than I feel it now when I hold your hand in mine, so, and catch the beating of your pulse in your veins, even through the fingers of your pretty little glove? Shall we look deeper into one another"s eyes and hearts than I look now into the very inmost depths of yours? Shall we drink in more fully the essence of love than when I touch your lips here--one moment, Selah, the gorse is very deep here--now don"t be foolish--ah, there, what"s the use of philosophising, tell me, by the side of that? Come over here to the bench, Selah, by the edge of the cliff; look down yonder into Ecclesbourne glen; hear the waves dashing on the sh.o.r.e below, and your own heart beating against your bosom within--and then ask yourself what"s the good of living in any moment, in any moment but the present."
Selah turned her great eyes admiringly upon him once more. "Oh, Herbert," she said, looking at him with a clever uneducated girl"s unfeigned and undisguised admiration for any cultivated gentleman who takes the trouble to draw out her higher self. "Oh, Herbert, how can you talk so beautifully to me, and then ask me why it is I"m longing for the day to come when I can be really and truly married to you? Do you think I don"t feel the difference between spending my life with such a man as you, and spending it for years and years together with a ranting, canting Primitive Methodist?"
Herbert smiled to himself a quiet, un.o.btrusive, self-satisfied smile. "She appreciates me," he thought silently in his own heart, "she appreciates me at my true worth; and, after all, that"s a great thing. Well, Selah," he went on aloud, toying unreproved with her pretty little silver bracelet, "let us be practical. You belong to a business family and you know the necessity for being practical.
There"s a great deal to be said in favour of my hanging on at Oxford a little longer. I must get a situation somewhere else as soon as possible, in which I can get married; but I can"t give up my fellowship without having found something else to do which would enable me to put my wife in the position I should like her to occupy."
"A very small income would do for me, with you, Herbert," Selah put in eagerly. "You see, I"ve been brought up economically enough, heaven knows, and I could live extremely well on very little."
"But _I_ could not, Selah," Herbert answered, in his colder tone.
"Pardon me, but I could not. I"ve been accustomed to a certain amount of comfort, not to say luxury, which I couldn"t readily do without. And then, you know, dear," he added, seeing a certain cloud gathering dimly on Selah"s forehead, "I want to make my wife a real lady."
Selah looked at him tenderly, and gave the hand she hold in hers a faint pressure. And then Herbert began to talk about the waves, and the cliffs, and the sun, and the great red sails, and to quote Sh.e.l.ley and Swinburne; and the conversation glided off into more ordinary everyday topics.
They sat for a couple of hours together on the edge of the cliff, talking to one another about such and other subjects, till, at last, Selah asked the time, hurriedly, and declared she must go off at once, or father"d be in a tearing pa.s.sion. Herbert walked back with her through the green lanes in the golden ma.s.s of gorse, till he reached the brow of the hill by the fisher village. Then Selah said lightly, "Not any nearer, Herbert--you see I can say Herbert quite naturally now--the neighbours will go talking about it if they see me standing here with a strange gentleman. Good-bye, good-bye, till Friday." Herbert held her face up to his in his hands, and kissed her twice over in spite of a faint resistance.
Then they each went their own way, Selah to the little green-grocer"s shop in a back street of the red-brick fisher village, and Herbert to his big fashionable hotel on the Marine Parade in the noisy stuccoed modern watering place.
"It"s an awkward sort of muddle to have got oneself into." he thought to himself as he walked along the asphalte pavement in front of the sea-wall: "a most confoundedly awkward fix to have got oneself into with a pretty girl of the lower cla.s.ses. She"s beautiful certainly; that there"s no denying; the handsomest woman on the whole I ever remember to have seen at any time anywhere; and when I"m actually by her side--though it"s a weakness to confess it--I"m really not quite sure that I"m not positively quite in love with her! She"d make a grand sort of Messalina, without a doubt, a model for a painter, with her frank imperious face, and her splendid voluptuous figure; a Faustina, a Catherine of Russia, an Ann Boleyn--to be fitly painted only by a Rubens or a Gustave Courbet.
Yet how I can ever have been such a particular fool as to go and get myself entangled with her I can"t imagine. Heredity, heredity; it must run in the family, for certain. There"s Ernest has gone and handed himself over bodily to this grocer person somewhere down in Devonshire; and I myself, who perfectly see the folly of his absurd proceeding, have independently put myself into this very similar awkward fix with Selah Briggs here. Selah Briggs, indeed! The very name reeks with commingled dissent, vulgarity, and greengrocery. Her father"s deacon of his chapel, and goes out at night when there"s no missionary meeting on, to wait at serious dinner parties! Or rather, I suppose he"d desert the most enticing missionary to earn a casual half-crown at even an unG.o.dly champagne-drinking dinner!
Then that"s the difference between me and Ernest. Ernest"s selfish, incurably and radically selfish. Because this Oswald girl happens to take his pa.s.sing fancy, and to fit in with his impossible Schurzian notions, he"ll actually go and marry her. Not only will he have no consideration for mother--who really is a very decent sort of body in her own fashion, if you don"t rub her up the wrong way or expect too much from her--but he"ll also interfere, without a thought, with MY prospects and my advancement. Now, THAT I call really selfish; and selfishness is a vulgar piggish vice that I thoroughly abominate. I don"t deny that I"m a trifle selfish myself, of course, in a refined and cultivated manner--I flatter myself, in fact, that introspective a.n.a.lysis is one of my strong points; and I don"t conceal my own failings from my own consciousness with any weak girlish prevarications. But after all, as Hobbes very well showed (though our shallow modern philosophers pretend to laugh at him), selfishness in one form or another is at the very base of all human motives; the difference really is between sympathetic and unsympathetic selfishness--between piggishness and cultivated feelings. Now _I_ will NOT give way to the foolish and selfish impulses which would lead me to marry Selah Briggs. I will put a curb upon my inclinations, and do what is really best in the end for all the persons concerned--and for myself especially."
He strolled down on to the beach, and began throwing pebbles carelessly into the plashing water. "Yes," he went on in his internal colloquy, "I can only account for my incredible stupidity in this matter by supposing that it depends somehow upon some incomprehensible hereditary leaning in the Le Breton family idiosyncrasy. It"s awfully unlike me, I will do myself the justice to say, to have got myself into such a silly dilemma all for nothing. It was all very well a few years ago, when I first met Selah. I was an undergraduate in those days, and even if somebody had caught me walking with a young lady of unknown antecedents and doubtful aspirates on the East Cliff at Hastings, it really wouldn"t have much mattered. She was beautiful even then--though not so beautiful as now, for she grows handsomer every day; and it was natural enough I should have taken to going harmless walks about the place with her. She attracted me by her social rebelliousness--another family trait, in me pa.s.sive not active, contemplative not personal; but she certainly attracted me. She attracts me still. A man must have some outlet for the natural and instinctive emotions of our common humanity; and if a monastic Oxford community imposes celibacy upon one with mediaeval absurdity--why, Selah Briggs is, for the time being, the only possible sort of outlet. One needn"t marry her in the end; but for the moment it is certainly very excellent fooling. Not unsentimental either--for my part I could never care for mere coa.r.s.e, commonplace, venal wretches. Indeed, when I spoke to her just now about my wishing to make my wife a lady, upon my word, at the time, I almost think I was just then quite in earnest. The idea flitted across my mind vaguely--"Why not send her for a year or two to be polished up at Paris or somewhere, and really marry her afterwards for good and always?" But on second thoughts, it won"t hold water. She"s magnificent, she"s undeniable, she"s admirable, but she isn"t possible. The name alone"s enough to condemn her. Fancy marrying somebody with a Christian name out of the hundred and somethingth psalm! It"s too atrocious! I really couldn"t inflict her for a moment on poor suffering innocent society."
He paused awhile, watching the great russet sails of the fishing vessels flapping idly in the breeze as the men raised them to catch the faint breath of wind, and then he thought once more, "But how to get rid of her, that"s the question. Every time I come here now she goes on more and more about the necessity of our getting soon married--and I don"t wonder at it either, for she has a perfect purgatory of a life with that snivelling Methodistical father of hers, one may be sure of it. It would be awfully awkward if any Oxford people were to catch me here walking with her on the cliff over yonder--some sn.i.g.g.e.ring fellow of Jesus or Worcester, for example, or, worse than all, some prying young Pecksniff of a third-year undergraduate! Somehow, she seems to fascinate me, and I can"t get away from her; but I must really do it and be done with it. It"s no use going on this way much longer. I must stop here for a few days more only, and then tell her that I"m called away on important college business, say to Yorkshire or Worcestershire, or somewhere.
I needn"t tell her in person, face to face: I can write hastily at the last moment to the usual name at the Post Office--to be left till called for. And as a matter of fact I won"t go to Yorkshire either--very awkward and undignified, though, these petty prevarications; when a man once begins lowering himself by making love to a girl in an inferior position, he lets himself in for all kinds of disagreeable necessities afterwards;--I shall go to Switzerland. Yes, no place better after the bother of running away like a coward from Selah: in the Alps, one would forget all petty human degradations; I shall go to Switzerland. Of course I won"t break off with her altogether--that would be cruel; and I really like her; upon my word, even when she isn"t by, up to her own level, I really like her; but I"ll let the thing die a natural death of inanition. As they always put it in the newspapers, with their stereotyped phraseology, a gradual coldness shall intervene between us. That"ll be the best and only way out of it.
"And if I go to Switzerland, why not ask Oswald of Oriel to go with me? That, I fancy, wouldn"t be a bad stroke of social policy.
Ernest WILL marry this Oswald girl; unfortunately he"s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile; and as he"s going to drag her inevitably into the family, I may as well put the best possible face upon the disagreeable matter. Let"s make a virtue of necessity.
The father and mother are old: they"ll die soon, and be gathered to their fathers (if they had any), and the world will straightway forget all about them. But Oswald will always be there en evidence, and the safest thing to do will be to take him as much as possible into the world, and let the sister rest upon HIS reputation for her place in society. It"s quite one thing to say that Ernest has married the daughter of a country grocer down in Devonshire, and quite another thing to say that he has married the sister of Oswald of Oriel, the distinguished mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society. How beautifully that warm brown sail stands out in a curve against the cold grey line of the horizon--a bulging curve just like the swell of Selah"s neck, when she throws her head back, so, and lets you see the contour of her throat, her beautiful rounded throat--ah, that"s not giving her up now, is it?--What a confounded fool I am, to be sure! Anybody would say, if they could only have read my thoughts that moment, that I was really in love with this girl Selah!"
CHAPTER XIII.
YE MOUNTAINS OF GILBOA!
The old Englischer Hof at Pontresina looked decidedly sleepy and misty at five o"clock on an August morning, when two st.u.r.dy British holiday-seekers, in knickerbockers and regular Alpine climbing rig, sat drinking their parting cup of coffee in the salle-a-manger, before starting to make the ascent of the Piz Margatsch, one of the tallest and by far the most difficult among the peaks of the Bernina range. There are few prettier villages in the Engadine than Pontresina, and few better hotels in all Switzerland than the old ivy-covered Englischer Hof. Yet on this particular morning, and at that particular hour, it certainly did look just a trifle cold and cheerless. "He never makes very warm in the Engadine," Carlo the waiter observed with a shudder, in his best English, to one of the two early risers: "and he makes colder on an August morning here than he makes at Nice in full December." For poor Carlo was one of those cosmopolitan waiters who follow the cosmopolitan tourist clientele round all the spas, health resorts, kurs and winter quarters of fashionable Europe. In January he and his brother, as Charles and Henri, handed round absinthes and cigarettes at the Cercle Nautique at Nice; in April, as Carlo and Enrico, they turned up again with water ices and wafer cakes in the Caffe Manzoni at Milan; and in August, the observant traveller might recognise them once more under the disguise of Karl and Heinrich, laying the table d"hote in the long and narrow old-fashioned dining-room of the Englischer Hof at Pontresina. Though their native tongue was the patois of the Canton Ticino, they spoke all the civilised languages of the world, "and also German," with perfect fluency, and without the slightest attempt at either grammar or idiomatic accuracy.
And they both profoundly believed in their hearts that the rank, wealth, youth, beauty and fashion of all other nations were wisely ordained by the inscrutable designs of Providence for a single purpose, to enrich and reward the active, intelligent, and industrious natives of the Canton Ticino.
"Are the guides come yet?" asked Harry Oswald of the waiter in somewhat feeble and hesitating German. He made it a point to speak German to the waiters, because he regarded it as the only proper and national language of the universal Teutonic Swiss people.
"They await the gentlemans in the corridor," answered Carlo, in his own peculiar and racy English; for he on his side resented the imputation that any traveller need ever converse with him in any but that traveller"s own tongue, provided only it was one of the recognised and civilised languages of the world, or even German.