The Duke's Sweetheart: A Romance. Dowling Richard

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СКАЧАТЬ with him. His easel, too, he should write for. Well, he'd go back to The Beagle now and have some breakfast, and write his letters afterwards.

      He clambered up out of the hollow on the northern side, and walked back to the inn much more briskly than he had come.

      "I shall make sketches and studies of the place while I am waiting for the easel and the canvas," he thought, as he went along the road.

      When he arrived at the inn he ordered breakfast, and sat down to write a couple of letters while he was waiting. The first of these was to the man in London from whom he got his colours, asking him to send a canvas of the size he wanted. The second ran as follows:

"Beagle Inn, Anerly, Devonshire,"June, 18-.

      "May it please your Grace, – I am now sojourning in Anerly, one of the most charming villages in the dominions of her who calls you Our right trusty and right entirely beloved Cousin. Everything here, including, of course, myself, is excellent, except the bread, which is beastly. The cocks and hens, the scenery, the cider, and all other things of that class, cannot be surpassed. There is a man here, six feet high, twenty-three years of age, sixteen stone ten (not an ounce of which you could pinch with a steel nippers), whom I have been telling of you, and who is awfully anxious to fight you. He is by profession a carpenter. He never saws a three-inch deal, but breaks it across his knee. He says he will fight you for nothing with great pleasure. I want you to come down at once and stop with me for a week or two. I'll treat you like a prince. You shall have three full meals and as many quarts of cider. The fact is, dear old Duke, I am going to paint a picture here. It's awfully good. I'll swear to you it's the loveliest thing you ever saw. It's the real whangdoodle, and no mistake. Come down and judge for yourself. And now I want you to do a thing for me. Go to my diggings (I mean the studio), get my big box of oils and my easel, and send them on here. You shall have one extra quart of cider for this job if you come. But if you don't come you shall not have a stiver. If you come I will tell you a story I heard here, and which will surely make your fortune if you write it. I am going to paint Anerly church, and this story is about Anerly church; so that if you come down, see the place, and do the story, it will be in a magnificent way writing up to my picture; and if you get out your book by next May, when your 'Romance of Anerly Church' is in the libraries, and my 'Under Anerly Bridge' is on the line, we shall both be helping one another to fame and fortune. Now, whatever you do or avoid doing, you must come here. I am called for breakfast. But remember and come. – I have the honour to be, my lord Duke, your Grace's most obliged and obedient servant,

"Edward Graham.

      "To His Grace the Duke of Long Acre.

      "P.S. – By-the-way, the people about whom I am to tell you the romance, are namesakes of yours.

"E. G."

      CHAPTER VI.

      WHAT'S IN A NAME?

      When the Duke of Long Acre got Edward Graham's letter, he immediately packed off the easel and colours. He liked Graham very much, and Graham loved him. Cheyne was one of those men who are always asked to do odd jobs for friends. He was good-humoured, of active habits, and liked to be busy always.

      Although he was prompt about the commission he had received, he had no intention of doing the other thing Graham asked. No inducement of an ordinary kind could drag him out of London just now. He was moderately busy for the papers and magazines to which he contributed, and he was exceedingly busy with the affairs of his heart.

      There was no happier lover in all London than Charles Augustus Cheyne. He loved his love, and his love loved him, and he envied no man's lot. She was as bright and dear a sweetheart as ever man had, and he loved her in a thoroughly comfortable common-sense way. He had written about romantic love, but he had never felt a pang of it in his private experience. Romance was a good thing in a book, for it amused one, but it was a poor stock-in-trade on which to begin matrimony. So he kept his romance for the public and his friends, and his straightforward manhood for his sweetheart. "Sweetheart" is the finest love-word we have in English, and she was his sweetheart-his sweetheart-his sweet heart.

      He loved her simply, frankly, wholly, without any mental reservation. He never told her he wanted to die for her, or that she was blameless or perfect. He told her she was as good a girl as any man ever might hope to marry. He knew she was as well as he knew that two and two are four. He praised her face less than was reasonable. He told her she had most lovely eyes, which was a temperate and judicial way of putting the matter. He was quite sure of his girl. He did not want anyone to tell him anything about her. He did not want her to tell him anything about herself. The only thing he wanted was to make her happy, and he thought he could do that. If she were happy he should be happy for three reasons-first, because he had an excellent constitution and was not soured by ill-health; secondly, because he had a gay and cheerful nature; thirdly, because the very sight of her happiness could not fail to be a source of abiding joy to him.

      When he put his arms round her he always felt glad he was big enough and strong enough to protect her. Once, while holding her a moment in his arms, he said:

      "I could crush you to death now. May, if I liked."

      "You great bear, don't frighten me to death first," she said.

      "Or," he added, "I think I could kill any man who annoyed you; of course I mean who injured you desperately."

      "Well," she said, "as I don't mean to be injured dreadfully by anyone, as I don't want to be frightened to death or crushed to death, I don't see why you should not let me go. Oh dear, men are such plagues."

      Yes, Charles Augustus Cheyne was a very strong man physically; mentally he was by no means so strong. Notwithstanding the fact that he told lies by the thousand, no one ever dreamed of saying he was a dishonourable man. He made no earthly use of his lies. If he told a new acquaintance that he had the day before dined with the Marquis of Belgravia, and his listener then asked him to dinner next day, Cheyne would most certainly decline to go. If he lied he lied for his own pleasure, not for his profit, not for the injury of anyone. He never said a bad word of any man he knew, and he never said a bad word of any member of the aristocracy, for had he not broken the bread of every member of it?

      But of all the weak points in Cheyne's mental equipment the weakest was a dread of an allusion to his family. Any allusion to his people always made him uncomfortable; and, where he could possibly manage to do so, he always changed the conversation as soon as possible. When asked point-blank who his father was, he replied in almost the same form of words: "My father was a poor gentleman who met many reverses of fortune." He never said anything about his mother, and those who knew him best had long ago made up their minds that he had no right to his father's name, and that Cheyne had been his mother's name, or an assumed one. Indeed most of his friends were convinced that neither his mother nor father had borne the name of Cheyne.

      He did not know much more about himself than those around him. He did not remember his father or mother. His earliest recollection was of an elderly spinster who wore corkscrew curls, kept a day-school for young ladies, and took in a few boarders. He was one of these boarders, and now he always looked back on that part of his life with the deadliest hatred. Two facts connected with that establishment clung to his imagination with terrible tenacity. First, that he never got anything to eat there but bread steeped in boiled milk; secondly, that on frosty days his schoolmistress hit him on the knuckles with a lead-pencil because he did not hold his pen properly. Even now the smell of bread steeped in boiling milk made him ill.

      From this school he was sent to another, a private one kept by a clergyman in Cumberland. No one ever visited him, and he never left school for holidays. He did not know who paid for him at those houses. He had a small allowance of pocket-money. At school he had displayed some taste for literature. He always took first place in essay-writing. He assumed from this that the clergyman must have СКАЧАТЬ