Somehow Good by William Frend De Morgan (best short novels TXT) 📕

did say about the Fenwick engagement?"

"It would be more proper, my dear, to speak of it as the Nightingale engagement. You will say it is a matter of form, but...."

"All right. The Nightingale engagement...."

"My dear! So abrupt! To your mother!"

"Well, dear mammy, what was it, really now?" This cajolery took effect, and the Widow Vereker's soul softened. She resumed her knitting.

"If you don't remember what it was, dear, it doesn't matter." The doctor saw that nothing short of complete concession would procure a tranquil sea.

"Of course, I remember perfectly well," he said mendaciously. He knew that, left alone, his mother would supply a summary of what he remembered. She did so, with a bound.

"I said, my dear (and I am glad you recollect it, Conrad)--I said from the very first, when Mr. Fenwick was living at Krakatoa--(it was all _quite_ right, my dear. Do you think I don't know? A grown-up daughter and two servants!)--I said that any one with eyes in their head could see. And has it turned out exactly as I expected, or has it not?"

"Exactly."

"Very well, dear. I'm glad you say so. Now, don't contradict me another time."

The close observer of the actual (whom we lay claim to be) has occasionally to report the apparently impossible. We do not suppose we shall be believed when we say that Mrs. Vereker added: "Besides, there was the Major."

* * * * *


Professor Sales Wilson, Laetitia's father, was _the_ Professor Sales Wilson. Only, if you had seen that eminent scholar when he got outside his library by accident and wanted to get back, you wouldn't have thought he was _the_ anybody, and would probably have likened him to a disestablished hermit-crab--in respect, that is, of such a one's desire to disappear into his shell, and that respect only. For no hermit-crab would ever cause an acquaintance to wonder why he should shave at all if he could do it no better than that; nor what he was talking to himself about so frequently; nor whether he polished his spectacles so long at a time to give the deep groove they were making across his nose a chance of filling up; nor whether he would be less bald if he rubbed his head less; nor what he had really got inside that overpowering phrenology of brow, and behind that aspect of chronic concentration. But about the retiring habits of both there could be no doubt.

He lived in his library, attired by nature in a dressing-gown and skull-cap. But from its secret recesses he issued manifestoes which shook classical Europe. He corrected versions, excerpted passages, disallowed authenticities, ascribed works to their true authors, and exposed the pretensions of sciolists with a vigour which ought to have finally dispersed that unhallowed class. Only it didn't, because they are a class incapable of shame, and will go on madly, even when they have been proved to be _mere_, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Perhaps they had secret information about the domestic circumstances of their destroyer, and didn't care. If Yamen had had private means of knowing that Vishnu was on uncomfortable terms with his wife, a corrected version of the whole Hindu mythology might have been necessary.

However, so far as can be conjectured, the image the world formed of the Professor was a sort of aggregate of Dr. Johnson, Bentley, Grotius, Mezzofanti, and a slight touch of, say Conington, to bring him well up to date. But so much of the first that whenever the _raconteur_ repeated one of the Professor's moderately bon-mots, he always put "sir" in--as, for instance, "A punster, sir, is a man who demoralises two meanings in one word;" or, "Should you call that fast life, sir? _I_ should call it slow death." The _raconteur_ was rather given to making use of him, and assigning to him _mots_ which were not at all _bons_, because they only had the "sir" in them, and were otherwise meaningless. He was distressed, not without reason, when he heard that he had said to Max Mueller, or some one of that calibre, "There is no such thing, sir, as the English language!" But he very seldom heard anything about himself, or any one else; as he passed his life, as aforesaid, in his library, buried in the Phoenician Dictionary he hoped he might live to bring out. He had begun the fourth letter; but _we_ don't know the Phoenician alphabet. Perhaps it has only four letters in it.

He came out of the library for meals, of course. But he took very little notice of anything that passed at the family board, and read nearly the whole time, occasionally saying something forcible to himself. Indeed, he never conversed with his family unless deprived of his book. This occurred on the occasion when Sally carried the momentous news of her mother's intended marriage to Ladbroke Grove Road, the second day after they had talked till two in the morning. Matrimony was canvassed and discussed in all its aspects, and the particular case riddled and sifted, and elucidated from every point of the compass, without the Professor being the least aware that anything unusual was afoot, until Grotefend got in the mayonnaise sauce.

"Take your master's book away, Jenkins," said the lady of the house. And Jenkins, the tender-hearted parlourmaid, allowed master to keep hold just to the end of the sentence. "Take it away, as I told you, and wipe that sauce off!"

Sally did so want to box that woman's ears--at least, she said so after. She was a great horny, overbearing woman, was Mrs. Sales Wilson, and Sally was frightened lest Laetitia should grow like her. Only, Tishy's teeth never _could_ get as big as that! Nor wiggle.

The Professor, being deprived of his volume, seemed to awake compulsorily, and come out into a cold, unlearned world. But he smiled amiably, and rubbed his hands round themselves rhythmically.

"Well, then!" said he. "Say it all again."

"Say what, papa?"

"All the chatter, of course."

"What for, papa?"

"For me to hear. Off we go! _Who's_ going to be married?"

"You see, he was listening all the time. _I_ shouldn't tell him, if I were you. Your father is really unendurable. And he gets worse." Thus the lady of the house.

"What does your mother say?" There is a shade of asperity in the Professor's voice.

"Says you were listening all the time, papa. So you were!" This is from Laetitia's younger sister, Theeny. Her name was Athene. Her brother Egerton called her "Gallows Athene"--an offensive perversion of the name of the lady she was called after. Her mother had carefully taught all her children contempt for their father from earliest childhood. But toleration of his weaknesses--etymology, and so on--had taken root in spite of her motherly care, and the Professor was on very good terms with his offspring. He negatived Theeny amiably.

"No, my dear, I was like Mrs. Cluppins. The voices were loud, and forced themselves upon my ear. But as you all spoke at once, I have no idea what anybody said. My question was conjectural--purely conjectural. _Is_ anybody going to marry anybody? _I_ don't know."

"What is your father talking about over there? _Is_ he going to help that tongue or not? Ask him." For a peculiarity in this family was that the two heads of it always spoke to one another through an agent. So clearly was this understood that direct speech between them, on its rare occasions, was always ascribed by distant hearers to an outbreak of hostilities. If either speaker had addressed the other by name, the advent of the Sergeant-at-Arms would have been the next thing looked for. On this occasion Laetitia's literal transmission of "_Are_ you going to help the tongue or not, papa?" recalled his wandering mind to his responsibilities. Sally's liver-wing--she was the visitor--was pleading at his elbow for its complement of tongue.

But soon a four-inch space intervened between the lonely tongue-tip on the dish and what had once been, in military language, its base of operations. Everybody that took tongue had got tongue.

"Well, then, how about who's married whom?" Thus the Professor, resuming his hand-rubbing, and neglecting the leg of a fowl.

"Make your father eat his lunch, Laetitia. We _cannot_ be late again this afternoon." Whereon every one ate too fast; and Sally felt very glad the Professor had given her such a big slice of tongue, as she knew she wouldn't have the courage to have a second supply, if offered, much less ask for it.

"Do you hear, papa? I'm to make you eat your lunch," says Laetitia; and her mother murmurs "That's right; make him," as though he were an anaconda in the snake-house, and her daughter a keeper who could go inside the cage. Laetitia then adds briefly that Mrs. Nightingale is going to marry Fenwick.

"Ha! Mercy on us!" says the Professor quite vaguely, and, even more so, adds: "Chicken--chicken--chicken--chicken--chicken!" Though what he says next is more intelligible, it is unfortunate and ill-chosen: "And who _is_ Mrs. Nightingale?"

The sphinx is mobility itself compared with Mrs. Wilson's intense preservation of her _status quo_. The import of which is that the Professor's blunders are things of everyday occurrence--every minute, rather. She merely says to Europe, "You see," and leaves that continent to deal with the position. Sally, who always gets impatient with the Wilson family, except the Professor himself and Laetitia--though _she_ is trying sometimes--now ignores Europe, and gets the offender into order on her own account.

"Why, Professor dear, don't you know Mrs. Nightingale's my mother? I'm Sally Nightingale, you know!"

"I'm not at all sure that I did, my dear. I think I thought you were Sally Something-else. My mind is very absent sometimes. You must forgive me. Sally Nightingale! To be sure!"

"Never mind, Professor dear!" But the Professor still looks vexed at his blunder. So Sally says in confirmation, "I've forgiven you. Shake hands!" And doesn't make matters much better, for her action seems unaccountable to the absent-minded one, who says, "Why?" first, and then, "Oh, ah, yes--I see. Shake hands, certainly!" On which the Sphinx, at the far end of the table, wondered whether the ancient Phoenicians were rude, under her breath.

"I'm so absent, Sally Nightingale, that I didn't even know your father wasn't living." Laetitia looks uncomfortable, and when Sally merely says, "I never saw my father," thinks to herself what a very discreet girl Sally is. Naturally she supposes Sally to be a wise enough child to know something about her own father. But the Wilson family were not completely in the dark about an unsatisfactory "something queer" in Sally's extraction; so that she credits that unconscious young person with having steered herself skilfully out of shoal-waters; but she is not sure whether to class her achievement as intrepidity or cheek. She is wanted in the intelligence department before she can decide this point.

"Perhaps, if you try, Laetitia, you'll be able to make out whether your father is or is not going to eat his lunch."

But as this appeal of necessity causes the Professor to run the risk of choking himself before Laetitia has time to formulate an inquiry, she can fairly allow the matter to lapse, as far as she is concerned. The dragon, her mother--for that was how Sally spoke of the horny one--kept an eye firmly fixed on the unhappy honorary member of most