birth-day? Did you never hear how many new performers enter on this – ha! ha! ha! – it’s impossible to speak gravely of it – on this preposterous and ridiculous business called Life, every minute?”
“No, father!”
“No, not you, of course; you’re a woman – almost,” said the Doctor. “By the bye,” and he looked into the pretty face, still close to his, “I suppose it’s your birth-day.”
“No! Do you really, father?” cried his pet daughter, pursing up her red lips to be kissed.
“There! Take my love with it,” said the Doctor, imprinting his upon them; “and many happy returns of the – the idea! – of the day. The notion of wishing happy returns in such a farce as this,” said the Doctor to himself, “is good! Ha! ha! ha!”
Doctor Jeddler was, as I have said, a great philosopher; and the heart and mystery of his philosophy was, to look upon the world as a gigantic practical joke: as something too absurd to be considered seriously, by any rational man. His system of belief had been, in the beginning, part and parcel of the battle-ground on which he lived; as you shall presently understand.
“Well! But how did you get the music?” asked the Doctor. “Poultry-stealers, of course. Where did the minstrels come from?”
“Alfred sent the music,” said his daughter Grace, adjusting a few simple flowers in her sister’s hair, with which, in her admiration of that youthful beauty, she had herself adorned it half-an-hour before, and which the dancing had disarranged.
“Oh! Alfred sent the music, did he?” returned the Doctor.
“Yes. He met it coming out of the town as he was entering early. The men are travelling on foot, and rested there last night; and as it was Marion’s birth-day, and he thought it would please her, he sent them on, with a pencilled note to me, saying that if I thought so too, they had come to serenade her.”
“Ay, ay,” said the Doctor, carelessly, “he always takes your opinion.”
“And my opinion being favorable,” said Grace, good-humouredly; and pausing for a moment to admire the pretty head she decorated, with her own thrown back; “and Marion being in high spirits, and beginning to dance, I joined her: and so we danced to Alfred’s music till we were out of breath. And we thought the music all the gayer for being sent by Alfred. Didn’t we, dear Marion?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Grace. How you teaze me about Alfred.”
“Teaze you by mentioning your lover!” said her sister.
“I am sure I don’t much care to have him mentioned,” said the wilful beauty, stripping the petals from some flowers she held, and scattering them on the ground. “I am almost tired of hearing of him; and as to his being my lover” —
“Hush! Don’t speak lightly of a true heart, which is all your own, Marion,” cried her sister, “even in jest. There is not a truer heart than Alfred’s in the world!”
“No – no,” said Marion, raising her eyebrows with a pleasant air of careless consideration, “perhaps not. But I don’t know that there’s any great merit in that. I – I don’t want him to be so very true. I never asked him. If he expects that I – . But, dear Grace, why need we talk of him at all, just now!”
It was agreeable to see the graceful figures of the blooming sisters, twined together, lingering among the trees, conversing thus, with earnestness opposed to lightness, yet with love responding tenderly to love. And it was very curious indeed to see the younger sister’s eyes suffused with tears; and something fervently and deeply felt, breaking through the wilfulness of what she said, and striving with it painfully.
The difference between them, in respect of age, could not exceed four years at most: but Grace, as often happens in such cases, when no mother watches over both (the Doctor’s wife was dead), seemed, in her gentle care of her young sister, and in the steadiness of her devotion to her, older than she was; and more removed, in course of nature, from all competition with her, or participation, otherwise than through her sympathy and true affection, in her wayward fancies, than their ages seemed to warrant. Great character of mother, that, even in this shadow, and faint reflection of it, purifies the heart, and raises the exalted nature nearer to the angels!
The Doctor’s reflections, as he looked after them, and heard the purport of their discourse, were limited, at first, to certain merry meditations on the folly of all loves and likings, and the idle imposition practised on themselves by young people, who believed, for a moment, that there could be anything serious in such bubbles, and were always undeceived – always!
But the home-adorning, self-denying qualities of Grace, and her sweet temper, so gentle and retiring, yet including so much constancy and bravery of spirit, seemed all expressed to him in the contrast between her quiet household figure and that of his younger and more beautiful child; and he was sorry for her sake – sorry for them both – that life should be such a very ridiculous business as it was.
The Doctor never dreamed of inquiring whether his children, or either of them, helped in any way to make the scheme a serious one. But then he was a Philosopher.
A kind and generous man by nature, he had stumbled, by chance, over that common Philosopher’s stone (much more easily discovered than the object of the alchemist’s researches), which sometimes trips up kind and generous men, and has the fatal property of turning gold to dross, and every precious thing to poor account.
“Britain!” cried the Doctor. “Britain! Halloa!”
A small man, with an uncommonly sour and discontented face, emerged from the house, and returned to this call the unceremonious acknowledgment of “Now then!”
“Where’s the breakfast table?” said the Doctor.
“In the house,” returned Britain.
“Are you going to spread it out here, as you were told last night?” said the Doctor. “Don’t you know that there are gentlemen coming? That there’s business to be done this morning, before the coach comes by? That this is a very particular occasion?”
“I couldn’t do anything, Doctor Jeddler, till the women had done getting in the apples, could I?” said Britain, his voice rising with his reasoning, so that it was very loud at last.
“Well, have they done now?” returned the Doctor, looking at his watch, and clapping his hands. “Come! make haste! where’s Clemency?”
“Here am I, Mister,” said a voice from one of the ladders, which a pair of clumsy feet descended briskly. “It’s all done now. Clear away, gals. Everything shall be ready for you in half a minute, Mister.”
With that she began to bustle about most vigorously; presenting, as she did so, an appearance sufficiently peculiar to justify a word of introduction.
She was about thirty years old; and had a sufficiently plump and cheerful face, though it was twisted up into an odd expression of tightness that made it comical. But the extraordinary homeliness of her gait and manner, would have superseded any face in the world. To say that she had two left legs, and somebody else’s arms; and that all four limbs seemed to be out of joint, and to start from perfectly wrong places when they were set in motion; is to offer the mildest outline of the reality. To say that she was perfectly content and satisfied with these arrangements, and regarded them as being no business of hers, and took her arms and legs as they came, and allowed them to dispose of themselves just as it happened, is to render faint justice to her equanimity. Her dress was a prodigious pair of self-willed shoes, that never wanted to go where her feet went; blue stockings; a printed gown of many colours, and the most hideous pattern procurable for money; and a white apron. She always wore short sleeves, and always had, by some accident, grazed elbows, in which she took so lively an interest that she was continually trying to turn them round and get impossible views of them. In general, a little cap perched somewhere on her head; though it was rarely to be met with in the place usually occupied in other subjects, by that article of dress; but from head to foot she was scrupulously clean, and maintained a kind of dislocated tidiness. Indeed her laudable anxiety to be tidy