Sweethearts at Home

"I have something to say to Nipper which you had better not hear," he remarked quietly. "Here is a special handful of sorrel to take home with you. Let me see you as far as the first lamp-post on my cycle. Then I will come back and speak with Nipper."

They went, and Nipper sat on the empty log, gloomily cursing fate – but, educated by the experience of many years, never for a moment doubting that Hugh John would keep his word.

He even timed him. He knew to within half-a-minute when the bright bull's-eye of his acetylene lantern would turn the corner of the Gypsies' Tryst. He saw it come. He stood up on his feet, and jerked his clenched hands once or twice forward into the gloaming.

Then Hugh John leaped from his cycle by the wall.

"Sit down, Nipper," he said. "I have something to say to you."

"Oh, I dare say," said Nipper; "you want to get out of fighting."

"Very well – you think so. I shall show you!" said Hugh John. "But first you have got to listen. You are troubling Elizabeth Fortinbras. She does not mean to be troubled. She will go away if you do not stop going into the shop. She told me so. She has always been my friend, and my sister's friend. Her father and mother are no use to such a girl. That is why I have tried to be a brother to her – "

"Brother, is it?" shouted Nipper, clenching his fists. "I will show you what it is to take a girl from Nipper Donnan. You were making love to her."

"I am her brother. She is my sister," Hugh John repeated, with his usual quiet persistency. "She is not yours in any way. Therefore I cannot take from you what you never possessed."

"I love her, and I will kill you, Hugh John Picton Smith!" moaned poor Nipper, his whole body shaking with impotent anger.

"Very well, you can try, though you are older," said Hugh John; "only, if I win, you will let Elizabeth Fortinbras alone."

"All right," said Nipper, "I agree. And if I lick you, you will stop prejudicing her against me!"

"You won't win!" prophesied Hugh John still more quietly.

And that is why Elizabeth Fortinbras' afternoons and evenings at New Erin Villa were thenceforward full of peace. Also why no young butcher hung any more over the counter, and why Mr. Nipper Donnan spent his evenings in the kitchen with Meg Linwood. It explains also why, when he came to say good-by to Elizabeth Fortinbras, Hugh John had a split lip.

Yet the girl asked no questions of her champion. She did not appear to notice the slight wound, and she sent away Hugh John with a single token of (sisterly) gratitude, and the curious reflection that a split lip does not spoil kissing nearly so much as a fellow might think.

XIII

"UNTO US AS A DAUGHTER"

November 2. The same Age.

[It is really the first of the month, but I date it the second, because the first is a Sunday, you see.]

After the fine weather of July came a horrid rainy spell. Now I don't mind so much when the days are short, the trees bare, and the time for winter lamps and winter fires is come. Then you can just shut yourself up, get some books you have been promising yourself for a long time to look at – and there you are.

But deluged park, dripping shrubbery, Esk-water growling turbidly at the foot of the Low Park, all the noble marine architecture of the two Torres Vedrases deep under swirling froth – that is what I hate, and especially with light to see it by – oh, good fourteen to sixteen hours of it. Pitter, patter on the roof, a sprinkle of broad drops on the window-panes from the trees swishing in the wind outside. After the first three days it grows unbearable.

It was a weary time, and a mockery for any one to call "holidays," especially after such a noble summer and autumn. But it cleared after Hugh John had been a week or two at college. During the wet weather I often went into the shop to see Elizabeth Fortinbras. I could now, you see, because Nipper Donnan was not always there.

More than once, however, I encountered his father, Butcher Donnan, who went about smiling and rubbing his hands – as if he had stopped the whole business. Of course I let him think so. For it is no good setting Grown-ups right. They always know better.

Well, and do you know, every time I went Elizabeth asked all about Hugh John, and if I had heard from him. At first I thought, as, of course, any girl would, that Elizabeth was only foxing to take me in. But afterwards I found out that they really did not write to one another. She owned, though, to having kissed him good-by. But that was only on account of his split lip and what he had done about Nipper.

Hugh John's explanation of his silence, given later, was that there were no sorrel stalks near the college, and that if Elizabeth really wanted anything, he knew that she would write and ask him.

Now, on the face of it, you would never believe this. It simply could not be, you would say. Yet it was. Even Nipper, who held out longest, ended by believing it. I, who had a sneaking liking for a love-story, of any sort, was secretly disappointed. Mrs. Donnan could not move in her kitchen for Nipper, who came home early now to talk to Meg Linwood.

Have you ever noticed that when any one has got a back-set in love, or what they think is love, they are quite apt to fly off at a tangent, and marry the least likely person in the world?

To the common eye, no one could have been less likely to engage Nipper's attention – with his lost love still in the front shop – than Meg Linwood in the back.

She was plump, rotund, rosy, where Elizabeth Fortinbras was slender, willowy, like Diana in the pictures and statues of her in the old Art Journals and Illustrated London News of the Exhibition year – I mean 1851. (As a child I always liked those volumes. There were such a lot of pictures in them, and so little reading.)

But it was lost labor advising Nipper Donnan. He would show Elizabeth Fortinbras what she had missed. He would have the finest shop, the best meat, the most regularly paid monthly accounts, the biggest, squarest stone house with stables for the smartest trap to drive out his wife in. And then Elizabeth would awake to her folly. But too late! Too late! Elizabeth's goose was cooked.

Nipper avoided the first outbreak of parental wrath by running off with Meg Linwood, and Mrs. Donnan consoled her husband by her usual reflection that all was for the best. There are, indeed, very few things breakable about a butcher's shop, and if Meg had stayed at New Erin Villa, a complete set of crockery would have been required at an early date.

From Dumfries and Glasgow, Nipper sent very brief letters expressive of a desire to come to terms with his father. He was married. That could not be altered or amended. Meg came of a respectable family, and (save the breakages) no fault could be found with her.

True, Mrs. Donnan sighed. She would rather have seen Nipper going proudly down the aisle with another than Meg Linwood on his arm. As for Butcher Donnan himself, as soon as he got over dwelling upon the thrashing he meant to give Nipper when he caught him, the outlines of a broader, farther reaching, less arbitrary settlement began to form themselves in his mind.

He saw his lawyer, Mr. John Liddesdale, and what they said to one another bore fruit afterwards. But it was a busy ten days for Butcher Donnan. He had to spend the early morning of every day in the down town shop. He had the rooms above it cleaned out, new furniture installed – and he abused his son as he went.

"The young fool!" was the best word for Nipper, forgetting that he himself had married at eighteen. Each afternoon he was out in the blue and gold van with the collapsible rain-hood. In the evenings he looked into the ashes of the kitchen fire and thought. It was then that Elizabeth proved herself above rubies to the old folks of New Erin.

"Faith, didn't I tell ye, from the first," cried Butcher Donnan, slapping his thigh mightily, "that's the girl, Cynthia! Nothing she will not turn her hand to – as smart as a jay, and all as sweet and natural as the Queen of Sheba coming it over Solomon!"

"It strikes me, Butcher Donnan," said his wife, "that for an old man you are getting wonderfully fond o' the lass!"

She was smiling also, a loving, caressing, motherly smile, showing mostly about the eyes, as she spoke of Elizabeth Fortinbras, which was very good to see.

"Fond of her, is it?" cried Donnan. "I declare, I'm as fond of her as I wad ha' been o' my own daughter, if it had pleased Mary an' the saints to give us one!"

"And why not?" said Mrs. Donnan, bending suddenly towards her husband, and startling him with the earnestness of her regard.

"Why not – Cynthia, woman? You have been talking to Mr. Liddesdale?"

"Not I," said his wife, smiling. "You should not talk in your sleep, that's all, Butcher Donnan, if you want to keep your little secrets."

"Ah, wife, wife, it's you that are the wonderful woman," cried the Butcher-Pastry-Cook; "but if that be so, faith, it's just as well I don't sleep with that Thief-o'-the-Wurrld Kemp, our sugar merchant. But what say you, wife?"

"I say what you say, Butcher Donnan!"

"Do you think she would accept? Would she come to us and be our daughter?"

"By this and that," said his wife, "mind, I take it for granted that you have done what is right by Nipper, and that he and Meg may come home when they like?"

"Not before Saturday!" said the Butcher; "furniture and all won't be in. And if I saw Nipper for the first time on any other day than the blessed Sabbath, I might be tempted even then to break his silly head!"

This from Butcher Donnan was equal to a stage benediction from another. But his wife looked for more light, and in answer to the question in her eyes he told her all.

"Oh, Nipper is all right. He gets more than he deserves, the rascal. I will let him off what he still owes me on the business. The shop and dwelling-house shall be put in his name, and that's a deal more than ever I dreamed of having at his age. As for the dollars – well, we will see about those, when you and I have done with them!"

"What do you think about asking Elizabeth?" said his wife.