JIMMY MARRABLE

Luncheon on the whole was a success, though Mrs. Gunn's behaviour exceeded anything that Hughie had feared.

She began by keeping the ladies adjusting their hair in Hughie's bedroom for something like ten minutes, while she recited to them a detailed and revolting description of her most recent complaint. Later, she initiated an impromptu and unseemly campaign—beginning with a skirmish of whispers in the doorway, swelling uproariously to what sounded like a duet between a cockatoo and a bloodhound on the landing outside, and dying away to an irregular fire of personal innuendoes, which dropped over the banisters one by one, like the gentle dew of heaven, on to the head of the retreating foe beneath—with a kitchen-man over a thumb-mark on a pudding-plate.

But fortunately for Hughie the company tacitly agreed to regard her as a form of comic relief; and when she kept back the salad-dressing for the express purpose—frustrated at the very last moment—of pouring it over the sweets; yea, even when she suddenly plucked a hairpin from her head with which to spear a wasp in the grassy corner pudding, the ladies agreed that she was "an old pet." When Mrs. Ames went so far as to follow her into the gyp-room after lunch and thank her for her trouble in waiting upon them, Mrs. Gunn, divided between extreme gratification and a desire to lose no time, unlimbered her batteries at once; and Hughie's tingling ears, as he handed round the coffee, overheard the portentous and mysterious fragment: "Well, mum, I put 'im straight to bed, and laid a hot flannel on his—," just as the door of the gyp-room swung to with a merciful bang.

It was now after two, and Hughie, in response to a generally expressed desire, laid before his guests a detailed programme for the afternoon. He proposed, first of all, to show them round the College. After that the party would proceed to Ditton Paddock in charge of Mr. Richard Lunn—who, it will be remembered, had been selected by Hughie as cavalier on account of his exceptional qualifications for the post—in company with a substantial tea-basket, the contents of which he hoped would keep them fortified in body and spirit until the races began with the Second Division, about five-thirty.

"How are you going to get us down to Ditton, Hughie?" inquired his uncle.

"Well, there's a fly which will hold five of you, and I thought"—Hughie cleared his throat—"I could take the other one down in a canoe."

There was a brief pause, while the company, glancing at one another with varying expressions of solemnity, worked out mental problems in Permutations and Combinations. Presently the tactless Ames inquired:—

"Which one are you going to take in the canoe?"

"Oh, anybody," said Hughie, in a voice which said as plainly as possible: "Silly old ass!"

However, realising that it is no use to continue skirmishing after your cover has been destroyed, he directed a gaze of invitation upon Miss Freshwater, who was sitting beside him on the seat.

She turned to him before he could speak.

"Hughie," she said softly, "take that child. Just look at her!"

Hughie obediently swallowed something, and turned to the wide-eyed and wistful picture on the sofa.

"Will you come, Joey?" he inquired.

The lady addressed signified, by a shudder of ecstasy, that the answer to the invitation was in the affirmative.

"Meanwhile," said Mr. Marrable, "I am going to smoke a cigar before I stir out of this room. And if you people will spare Hughie for ten minutes, I'll keep him here and have a short talk with him. I must go back to-night."

The accommodating Mr. Lunn suggested that this interval should be bridged by a personally conducted expedition to his rooms downstairs, where he would have great pleasure in exhibiting to the company a "rather decent" collection of door-knockers and bell-handles, the acquisition of which articles of vertu (he being a youth of strong wrist and fleet foot) was a special hobby of his.

Hughie was left alone with his uncle—the only relation he possessed in the world, and the man who had been to him both father and mother for nearly eighteen years.

Hughie had been born in India. His recollections of his parents were vague in the extreme, but if he shut both eyes and pressed hard upon them with his hands he could summon up various pictures of a beautiful lady, whose arms were decked with glittering playthings that jingled musically when she carved the chicken for Hughie's nursery dinner. He particularly remembered these arms, for their owner had a pleasant habit of coming up to kiss him good-night after his ayah had put him to bed. On these occasions they were always bare; and Hughie remembered quite distinctly how much more comfortable they were then than next morning at tiffin, when they were enclosed in sleeves which sometimes scratched.

Of his father he remembered less, except that he was a very large person who wore gorgeous raiment of scarlet. Also things on his heels which clicked. He had a big voice, too, this man, and he used to amuse himself by training Hughie to stand stiffly erect whenever he cried, "'Shun!"

Hughie also remembered a voyage on a big ship, where the passengers made much of him, and a fascinating person in a blue jersey (which unfortunately scratched) presented him with numerous string balls, which smelt most gloriously of tar but always fell into the Indian Ocean or some other inaccessible place.

Then he remembered arriving with his parents at a big bungalow in a compound full of grassplots and flower-beds, where a person whom he afterwards learned to call Uncle Jimmy greeted him gravely and asked him to accept his hospitality for a time. After that—quite soon—he remembered saying good-bye to his parents, or rather, his parents saying good-bye to him. The big man shook him long and solemnly by the hand, which hurt a good deal but impressed Hughie deeply, and the beautiful lady's arms—with thick sleeves on, too!—clung round Hughie's neck till he thought he would choke. But he stood stiffly at "'shun" all the time, because his parents seemed thoroughly unhappy about something, and he desired to please them. He had never had a woman's arms round his neck since.

After his parents had gone, he settled down happily enough in the big compound, which he soon learned to call "the garding." The name of the bungalow he gathered from most of the people with whom he came in contact was "The 'All," though there were some who called it "Manors," and Uncle Jimmy, who, too, apparently possessed more than one name, was invariably referred to by Hughie's friends in the village as "Ole Peppery."

Very shortly after his parents' departure Hughie overheard a conversation between his uncle and Mrs. Capper, the lady who managed the household, which puzzled him a good deal.

"Understand, Capper, I won't have it," said his uncle.

"Think what people will say, sir," urged Mrs. Capper respectfully but insistently.

"I don't care a"—Capper coughed discreetly here—"what people say. The boy is not going to be decked out in crape and hearse-plumes to please you or any other old woman."

"Hearse-plumes would not be essential, sir," said the literal Capper. "But I think the child should have a little black suit."

"The child will run about in his usual rags," replied Old Peppery, in a voice of thunder; "and if I catch you or any one else stuffing him up with yarns about canker-worms or hell-fire, or any trimmings of that description, I tell you straight that there will be the father and mother of a row."

"Yes, sir," said Capper meekly. "And I desire, sir," she added in the same even tone, "to give warning."

Thereupon Uncle Jimmy had stamped his way downstairs to the hall, and Hughie was left wondering what the warning could have been which Mrs. Capper desired to utter. It must have been a weighty one, for she continued to deliver it at intervals during the next ten years, long indeed after Hughie's growing intelligence had discovered its meaning. But her utterances received about as much attention from her employer as Cassandra's from hers.

However, the immediate result of the conversation recorded above was that Mrs. Capper made no attempt to deck Hughie in crape or hearse-plumes; and later on, when he was old enough to understand the meaning of death, his uncle told him how his parents had gone to their God together—"the happiest fate, old man, that can fall on husband and wife"—one stormy night in the Bay of Biscay, in company with every other soul on board the troop-ship Helianthus, and that henceforth Hughie must be prepared to regard the broken-down old buffer before him as his father and mother.

Hughie had gravely accepted this arrangement, and for more than seventeen years he and his uncle had treated one another as father and son.

Jimmy Marrable was a little eccentric,—but so are most old bachelors,—and like a good many eccentric men he rather prided himself on his peculiarities. If anything, he rather cultivated them. One of his most startling characteristics was a habit of thinking aloud. He would emerge unexpectedly from a brown study, to comment to himself with stunning suddenness and absolute candour on the appearance and manners of those around him. It was credibly reported that he had once taken a rather intense and voluble lady in to dinner, and after regarding her for some time with a fixity of attention which had deluded the good soul into the belief that he was hanging on her lips, had remarked to himself, with appalling distinctness, during a lull in the conversation: "Guinea set—misfit at the top—gutta-percha fixings—wonder they don't drop into her soup!" and continued his meal without any apparent consciousness of having said anything unusual.

He was eccentric, too, about other matters. Once Hughie, returning from school for his holidays, discovered that there had been an addition to the family in his absence.

Mrs. Capper's very face in the hall told him that something was wrong. Its owner informed Hughie that though one should be prepared to take life as one found it, and live and let live had been her motto from infancy, her equilibrium ever since the thing had happened had lain at the mercy of the first aggressively disposed feather that came along, and what people in the neighbourhood would say she dared not think.

She ran on. Hughie waited patiently, and presently unearthed the facts.

A few weeks ago the master had returned from a protracted visit to London, bringing with him two children. He had announced that the pair were henceforth to be regarded as permanent inmates of the establishment. Beyond the fact that one brat was fair and a boy and the other darkish and a girl, and that Mrs. Capper had given warning on sight, Hughie could elicit nothing, and waited composedly for his uncle to come home from shooting.

Jimmy Marrable, when he arrived, was not communicative. He merely stated that the little devils were the children of an old friend of his, called Gaymer, who had died suddenly and left them to be brought up by him as guardian.

"And Hughie, my son," he concluded, "if you don't want your head bitten off you will refrain in this case from indulging in your propensity for asking why and getting to the bottom of things. I'm not best pleased at finding them on my hands, but here they are and there's an end of it. The girl is five—ten years younger than you—and the boy's eight. She is called Joan, and his idiotic name is Lancelot Wellesley. I wonder they didn't christen him Galahad Napoleon! Come upstairs and see them."

All this had occurred seven years ago. During that time Lancelot Wellesley Gaymer had grown up sufficiently to go to a public school, and consequently Miss Joan Gaymer had been left very much in the company of the curious old gentleman whom she had soon learned to call Unker Zimmy. Of their relations it will be sufficient at present to mention that a more curiously assorted and more thoroughly devoted couple it would be difficult to find.

Jimmy Marrable reclined on the window seat and smoked his cigar. His nephew, enviously eyeing the blue smoke, sprawled in an arm-chair.

"Hughie," said the elder man suddenly, "how old are you? Twenty-one, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"And are you going down for good next week?"

"Yes." Hughie sighed.

"Got a degree?"

"Tell you on Tuesday."

"Tell me now."

"Well—yes, I should think."

"What in?"

"Mechanical Stinks—Engineering. Second Class, if I'm lucky."

"Um. Got any vices?"

"Not specially."

"Drink?"

"No."

"Not a teetotaller?" said Jimmy Marrable in some concern.

"No."

"That's good. Ever been drunk?"

"Yes."

"Badly, I mean. I'm not talking about bump-supper exhilaration."

"Only once."

"When?"

"My first term."

"What for?"

"To see what it was like."

"Perfectly sound proceeding," commented Jimmy Marrable. "What were your impressions of the experiment?"

"I haven't got any," said Hughie frankly. "I only woke up next morning in bed with my boots on."

"Who put you there?"

"Seven other devils."

"And you have not repeated the experiment?"

"No. There's no need. I know my capacity to a glass now."

"Then you know something really worth knowing," remarked Jimmy Marrable with sincerity. "Now, what are you going to do with yourself? Why not go and see the world a bit? You have always wanted to. And do it thoroughly while you are about it. Take five years over it; ten if you like. You will like, you know. It's in the blood. That's why I think you are wise not to want to enter the Service. You can always scrape in somewhere if there is a war, and barrack-life in time of peace would corrode your very heart out. It nearly killed your dad at five-and-twenty. That was why he exchanged and took to the Frontier, and ended his days in command of a Goorkha regiment. Life at first hand; that's what we Marrables thrive on! I never set foot in this country myself between the ages of twenty and thirty-three. I would come with you again if it wasn't for Anno Domini—and the nippers. But you'll find a good many old friends of mine dotted about the world. They're not all folk I could give you letters of introduction to—some of 'em don't speak English and others can't read and write; but they'll show you the ropes better than any courier. You take my advice, and go. England is no place for a young man with money and no particular profession, until he's over thirty and ready to marry. Will you go, Hughie?"

Hughie's expression showed that he was considering the point rather reluctantly. His uncle continued:—

"Money all right, I suppose? You have eight hundred a-year now you are of age. Got any debts, eh? I'll help you."

"None to speak of. Thanks all the same."

"Well; why not go?"

"I should like to go more than anything," said Hughie slowly, "but—"

"Well?"

"I don't know—that is—"

"I do," said Jimmy Marrable with characteristic frankness. "You are struggling between an instinct which tells you to do the sensible thing and an overpowering desire to do a dashed silly one."

Hughie grew very red.

His uncle continued:—

"You want to marry that girl."

Hughie blazed up.

"I do," he said, rather defiantly.

The cigar glowed undisturbedly.

"You think that life has no greater happiness to offer you?"

"I am sure of it," said Hughie, with an air of one stating a simple truth.

"And you are twenty-one?"

"Ye—es," with less fire.

Jimmy Marrable smoked reflectively for a few minutes.

"I am an old bachelor," he said at last, "and old bachelors are supposed to know nothing about love-affairs. The truth of course is that they know far more than any one else."

Hughie was accustomed to these obiter dicta.

"Why?" he asked dutifully.

"Well, for the same reason that a broken swashbuckler knows a deal more about soldiering than a duly enrolled private of the line. He has had a more varied experience. The longer a man remains a bachelor the more he learns about women; and the more he learns about women the better able he will be to make his way in the world. Therefore, if he marries young he reduces his chances of success in life to a minimum. The sad part about it all is that, provided he gets the girl he wants, he doesn't care. That, by the way, is the reason why nearly all the most famous men in history have either been unhappily married or not married at all. Happiness has no history. Happily married men are never ambitious. They don't go toiling and panting after—"

"They have no need to," said Hughie. "A man doesn't go on running after a tram-car after he has caught it."

"That begs the question, Hughie. It presumes that all the available happiness in the world is contained in one particular tram-car. Besides, the tram-cars you mean are intended for men over thirty. The young ought to walk."

Hughie realised that the conversation was growing rather too subtle for him, and reverted to plain cut and thrust.

"Then you think no man should marry before thirty?" he said.

"Nothing of the kind! It depends on the man. If he is a steady, decent, average sort of fellow, who regards a ledger as a Bible and an office-stool as a stepping-stone to the summit of the universe, and possesses no particular aptitude for the rough-and-tumble of life, the sooner he marries and settles down as a contented old pram-pusher the better for him and the nation. Do you fancy yourself in that line, Hughie?"

"No-o-o," said Hughie reluctantly. "But I might learn," he added hopefully. "I'm a pretty adaptable bloke."

Jimmy Marrable threw his cigar-end out of the window, and sat up.

"Listen, Hughie," he said, "and I'll tell you what you really are. You are the son of a mother who climbed out of her bedroom window (and let herself down a rain-pipe that I wouldn't have trusted a monkey on) in order to elope with the man she loved. Your father was the commander of as tough a native regiment as I have ever known. Your grandfather was an explorer. I've been a bit of a rolling-stone myself. About one relation of yours in three dies in his bed. You come of a stock which prefers to go and see things for itself rather than read about them in the newspaper, and which has acquired a considerable knowledge of the art of handling men in the process. Those are rather rare assets. If you take a woman in tow at the tender age of twenty-one, there will be a disaster. Either you will sit at home and eat your heart out, or you will go abroad and leave her to eat out hers. Am I talking sense?"

Hughie sighed like a furnace.

"Yes, confound you!" he said.

"Will you promise not to rush into matrimony, then?"

"Perhaps she'll wait for me," mused Hughie.

"How old is she?"

"Twenty-one, like me."

"H'm," remarked Jimmy Marrable drily. "That means that she is for all practical purposes ten years your senior. However, perhaps she will. Pigs might fly. But will you promise me to think the matter over very carefully before deciding not to go abroad?"

"Yes," said Hughie.

"That being the case," continued his uncle briskly, "I want to tell you one or two things. If you do go, I may never see you again."

"I say," said Hughie in alarm, "there's nothing wrong with your health, is there, old man?"

"Bless you, no! But once a Marrable takes to the wilds Methuselah himself couldn't reckon on living long enough to see him again. So I am going to talk to you while I've got you. I am taking this opportunity of being near town to see my solicitor and make my will. I am fit enough, but I am fifty this year; and at that age a man ought to make some disposition of his property. I may as well tell you that I have left you nothing. Annoyed?"

"Not in the least."

"And I have left nothing to Master Lance."

Hughie looked a little surprised at this.

"I mean to start him on his own legs before my demise," explained Jimmy Marrable. "Immediately, in fact. That is partly what I am going up to town for. I am investing a sum for him which ought to bring him in about two hundred a year for the rest of his life. He's nearly sixteen now, and he'll have to administer his income himself—pay his own school-bills and everything. Just as I made you do. Nothing like accustoming a boy to handling money when he's young. Then he doesn't go a mucker when he suddenly comes into a lot of it. I shan't give him more, because it would prevent him from working. Two hundred won't. A slug would perhaps live contentedly enough on it, but Lancelot Wellesley Gaymer is a pretentious young sweep, and he'll work in order to gain the means for making a splash. The two hundred will keep him going till he finds his feet."

Jimmy Marrable paused, and surveyed his nephew rather irritably.

"Well," he inquired at length, "haven't you any contribution to make to this conversation?"

"Can't say I have had much chance so far," replied the disrespectful Hughie.

"Don't you want to know what I'm going to do with the rest of my money? That's a question that a good many people are worrying themselves about. Don't you want to join in the inquisition?"

"Can't say I do. No business of mine."

His uncle surveyed him curiously.

"You're infernally like your father, Hughie," he said. "Well, I'm going to leave it to Joey."

"Good scheme," said Hughie.

"You think so?"

"Rather!"

"There's a lot of it," continued his uncle reflectively. "Some of it is tied up rather queerly, too. My executors will have a bit of a job."

He surveyed the impassive Hughie again.

"Don't you want to know who my executors are?" he inquired quite angrily.

"No," said Hughie, who was deep in other thoughts at the moment. "Not my business," he repeated.

"Hughie," said Jimmy Marrable, "you are poor Arthur over again. He was a cursedly irritating chap at times," he added explosively.

A babble of cheerful voices on the staircase announced the return of the safe-looking Mr. Lunn and party. They flowed in, entranced with that gentleman's door-knockers (the countenances of which, by the way, were usually compared by undergraduate critics, not at all unfavourably, with that of their owner), and declared themselves quite ready now to be properly impressed by whatever features of the College Hughie should be pleased to exhibit to them.

One tour round a College is very like another; and we need not therefore follow our friends up and down winding staircases, or in and out of chapels and libraries, while they gaze down on the resting-places of the illustrious dead or gape up at the ephemeral abodes of the undistinguished living.

The expedition was chiefly remarkable (to the observant eye of Mrs. Ames) for the efforts made by its conductor to get lost in suitable company—an enterprise which was invariably frustrated by the resolute conduct of that small but determined hero-worshipper, Miss Joan Gaymer. On one occasion, however, Hughie and Miss Freshwater were left together for a moment. The party had finished surveying the prospect from the roof of the College Chapel, and were painfully groping their way in single file down a spiral staircase. Only Hughie, Miss Freshwater, and the ubiquitous Miss Gaymer were left at the top.

"You go next, Joey," said Hughie; "then Miss Freshwater, then me."

The lady addressed plunged obediently into the gloomy chasm at her feet. She observed with frank jealousy that the other two did not immediately follow her, and accordingly waited for them in the belfry half-way down.

Presently she heard their footsteps descending; and Miss Freshwater's voice said:—

"I wanted to tell you about it first of anybody, Hughie, because you and I have always been such friends. Nobody else knows yet."

There was a silence, broken only by Hughie's footsteps, evidently negotiating a difficult turn. Then Miss Freshwater's voice continued, a little wistfully:—

"Aren't you going to congratulate me?"

And Hughie's voice, sounding strangely sepulchral in the echoing darkness, replied:—

"Rather! I—I—hope you'll be very happy. Mind that step."

Miss Gaymer wondered what it was all about.

Hughie found an opportunity before the day was over of holding another brief conversation with his uncle, in the course of which he expressed an opinion on the advantages of immediate and extensive foreign travel which sent that opponent of early marriages back to town in a thoroughly satisfied frame of mind.

"There ought to be a statue," said Jimmy Marrable to his cigar, as he leaned back reflectively in his railway carriage, "set up in the capital of every British Colony, representing a female figure in an attitude of aloofness, and inscribed: Erected by a grateful Colony to its Principal Emigration Agent—The Girl at Home Who Married Somebody Else."

Then he sighed to himself—rather forlornly, a woman would have said.