ARMADALE. BY WILKIE COLLINS, AUTHOR OF "NO NAME,” “THE WOMAN IN WHITE," ETC, BOOK THE THIRD. CHAPTER VIII. THE NORFOLK BROADS. THE little group gathered together in Major Milroy's parlor to wait for the carriages from Thorpe-Ambrose would hardly have conveyed the idea, to any previously uninstructed person introduced among them, of a party assembled in expectation of a picnic. They were almost dull enough, so far as outward appearances went, to have been a party assembled in expectation of a marriage. Even Miss Milroy herself, though conscious of looking her best in her bright muslin dress and her gayly-feathered new hat, was at this inauspicious moment Miss Milroy under a cloud. Although Allan's note had assured her, in Allan's strongest language, that the one great object of reconciling the governess's arrival with the celebration of the picnic was an object achieved, the doubt still remained whether the plan proposed-whatever it might be-would meet with her father's approval. In a word, Miss Milroy declined to feel sure of her day's pleasure until the carriage made its appearance and took her from the door. The major, on his side, arrayed for the festive occasion in a tight blue frock-coat which he had not worn for years, and threatened with a whole long day of separation from his old friend and comrade the clock, was a man out of his element, if ever such a man existed yet. As for the friends who had been asked at Allan's request-the widow lady (otherwise Mrs. Pentecost) and her son (the Reverend Samuel) in delicate health-two people less capable (apparently) of adding to the hilarity of the day could hardly have been dis covered in the length and breadth of all England. A young man who plays his part in society by looking on in green spectacles, and listening with a sickly smile, may be a prodigy of intellect and a mine of virtue, but he is hardly, perhaps, the right sort of man to have at a picnic. An old lady afflicted with deafness, whose one inexhaustible subject of interest is the subject of her son, and who (on the happily rare occasions when that son opens his lips) asks every body eagerly, "What does my boy say?" is a person to be pitied in respect of her infirmities, and a person to be admired in respect of her maternal devotedness, but not a person, if the thing could possibly be avoided, to take to a picnic. Such a man, nevertheless, was the Reverend Samuel Pentecost, and such a woman was the Reverend Samuel's mother, and, in the dearth of any other producible guests, there they were, engaged to eat, drink, and be merry for the day at Mr. Armadale's pleasure-party to the Norfolk Broads. After The arrival of Allan, with his faithful follower, Pedgift Junior, at his heels, roused the flagging spirits of the party at the cottage. The plan for enabling the governess to join the picnic, if she arrived that day, satisfied even Major Milroy's anxiety to show all proper attention to the lady who was coming into his house. writing the necessary note of apology and invitation, and addressing it in her very best handwriting to the new governess, Miss Milroy ran up stairs (a little anxiously) to say good-by to her mother, and returned, with a smiling face and a side-look of relief directed at her father, to announce that there was nothing now to keep any of them a moment longer indoors. The company at once directed their steps to the garden-gate, and were there met face to face by the second great difficulty of the day. How were the six persons of the picnic to be divided between the two open carriages that were in waiting for them? Here, again, Pedgift Junior exhibited his invaluable faculty of contrivance, and solved the problem off-hand before two words could be said about it. This highly-cultivated young man possessed in an eminent degree an accomplishment more or less peculiar to all the young men of the age we live in-he was perfectly capable at all times and under all circumstances of taking his pleasure without forgetting his business. Such a client as the Master of ThorpeAmbrose fell but seldom in his father's way, and to pay special but unobtrusive attention to Allan all through the day, was the business of which young Pedgift, while proving himself to be the life and soul of the picnic, never once lost sight from the beginning of the merry-making to the end. He had detected the state of affairs between Miss Milroy and Allan at a glance, and he at once provided for his client's inclinations in that quarter, by offering (in virtue of his local knowledge) to lead the way in the first carriage, and by asking Major Milroy and the curate if they would do him the honor of accompanying him. "We shall pass a very interesting place to a military man, Sir," said young Pedgift, addressing the major, with his happy and unblushing confidence, "the remains of a Roman encampment. And my father, Sir, who is a subscriber," proceeded this rising lawyer, turning to the curate, "wished me to ask your opinion of the new Infant School buildings at Little Gill Beck. Would you kindly give it me, Sir, as we go along?" He opened the carriage-door, and helped in the major and the curate before they could either of them start any difficulties. The necessary result followed. Allan and Miss Milroy rode together in the same carriage, with the extra convenience of a deaf old lady in attendance to keep the squire's compliments within the necessary limits. Never yet had Allan enjoyed such an interview with Miss Milroy as the interview he now had on the road to the Broads. The dear old lady, after a little anecdote or two on the subject of her son, did the one thing wanting to secure the perfect felicity of her two youthful companions she became considerately blind for the occasion as well as deaf. A quarter of an hour after the carriage left the major's cottage the poor old soul, reposing on snug cushions and fanned by a fine summer air, fell peaceably asleep. Allan made love, and Miss Milroy vehicle, directed Allan's attention, in a shrill tenor voice, and with an excellent choice of language, to objects of interest on the road. The only way to quiet him was to answer, which Allan invariably did by shouting back, "Yes, beautiful;" upon which young Pedgift disappeared again in the recesses of the leading carriage, and took up the Romans and the Infants where he had left them last. The scene through which the picnic party was now passing merited far more attention than it received either from Allan or Allan's friends. The carriages stopped, the love-making broke off, and the venerable Mrs. Pentecost, recovering the use of her senses at a moment's notice, fixed her eyes sternly on Allan the instant she woke. "I see in your face, Mr. Armadale," said the old lady, sharply, "that you think I have been asleep." The consciousness of guilt acts differently on the two sexes. In nine cases out of ten it is a much more manageable consciousness with a woman than with a man. All the confusion, on this occasion, was on the man's side. While Allan reddened and looked embarrassed, the quick-witted Miss Milroy instantly embraced the old lady with a burst of innocent laughter. "He is quite incapable, dear Mrs. Pentecost," said the little hypocrite, "of any thing so ridiculous as thinking you have been asleep!" "All I wish Mr. Armadale to know," pursued the old lady, still suspicious of Allan, “is, that my head being giddy, I am obliged to close my eyes in a carriage. Closing the eyes, Mr. Armadale, is one thing, and going to sleep is another. Where is my son?" The Reverend Samuel appeared silently at the carriage door with his green spectacles and his sickly smile in perfect working order, and assisted his mother to get out. "Did you enjoy the drive, Sammy?" asked the old lady. "Beautiful scenery, my dear, wasn't it?” An hour's steady driving from the major's cottage had taken young Armadale and his guests beyond the limits of Midwinter's solitary walk, and was now bringing them nearer and nearer to one of the strangest and loveliest aspects of Nature which the inland landscape, not of Norfolk only, but of all England, can show. Little by little, the face of the country began to change as the carriage approached the remote and lonely district of the Broads. The wheatfields and turnip-fields became perceptibly fewer; and the fat green grazing-grounds on either side grew wider and wider in their smooth and sweeping range. Heaps of dry rushes and reeds, laid up for the basket-maker and the thatcher, began to appear at the road-side. The old gabled cottages of the early part of the drive dwindled and disappeared, and huts with mud walls rose in their place. With the ancient church-towers and the wind and water mills, Young Pedgift, on whom all the arrangewhich had hitherto been the only lofty objects ments for exploring the Broads devolved, busseen over the low marshy flat, there now rose tled about, giving his orders to the boatmen. all round the horizon, gliding slow and distant Major Milroy, placid and patient, sat apart on behind fringes of pollard willows, the sails of an overturned punt, and privately looked at his invisible boats moving on invisible waters. All watch. Was it past noon already? More than the strange and startling anomalies presented an hour past. For the first time, for many a by an inland agricultural district, isolated from long year, the famous clock at home had struck other districts by its intricate surrounding net- in an empty work-shop. Time had lifted his work of pools and streams, holding its com- wonderful scythe, and the corporal and his men munications and carrying its produce by water had relieved guard, with no master's eye to instead of by land-began to present themselves watch their performances, with no master's in closer and closer succession. Nets appeared hand to encourage them to do their best. The on cottage palings; little flat-bottomed boats major sighed as he put his watch back in his lay strangely at rest among the flowers in cot-pocket. tage gardens; farmers' men passed to and fro "I'm afraid I'm too old for this sort of clad in composite costume of the coast and the thing," thought the good man, looking about field-in sailors' hats and fishermen's boots, and him dreamily. "I don't find I enjoy it as plowmen's smocks-and even yet the low-lying much as I thought I should. When are we labyrinth of waters, unbosomed in its mystery going on the water, I wonder? where's Neelie?" of solitude, was a hidden labyrinth still. A Neelie-more properly Miss Milroy-was beminute more, and the carriages took a sudden hind one of the carriages with the promoter of turn from the hard high-road into a little weedy the picnic. They were immersed in the interlane. The wheels ran noiseless on the damp esting subject of their own Christian names, and and spongy ground. A lonely outlying cottage Allan was as near a point-blank proposal of appeared, with its litter of nets and boats. A marriage as it is well possible for a thoughtless few yards farther on, and the last morsel of young gentleman of two-and-twenty to be. firm earth suddenly ended in a tiny creek and quay. One turn more to the end of the quayand there, spreading its great sheet of water, far and bright and smooth, on the right hand and the left-there, as pure in its spotless blue, as still in its heavenly peacefulness, as the summer sky above it, was the first of the Norfolk Broads. "Tell me the truth," said Miss Milroy, with her eyes modestly riveted on the ground, "when you first knew what my name was you didn't like it, did you?" "I like every thing that belongs to you," rejoined Allan, vigorously. "I think Eleanor is a beautiful name; and yet, I don't know why, I think the major made an improvement when | At the same moment, from the other side of the he changed it to Neelie." "I can tell you why, Mr. Armadale," said the major's daughter, with great gravity. "There are some unfortunate people in this world whose names are how can I express it?-whose names are, Misfits. Mine is a Misfit. I don't blame my parents, for of course it was impossible to know when I was a baby how I should grow up. But as things are, I and my name don't fit each other. When you hear a young lady called Eleanor, you think of a tall, beautiful, interesting creature directly-the very opposite of me! With my personal appearance Eleanor is ridiculous-and Neelie, as you yourself remarked, is just the thing. No! no! don't say any more -I'm tired of the subject; I've got another name in my head, if we must speak of names, which is much better worth talking about than mine." carriage, the lurid spectacles of the Reverend Samuel showed themselves officiously on the search, and the voice of the Reverend Samuel's mother (who had, with neat dexterity, put the two ideas of the presence of water and a sudden movement among the company together) inquired distractedly if any body was drowned? Sentiment flies and Love shudders at all demonstrations of the noisy kind. Allan said, "Damn it!" and rejoined young Pedgift. Miss Milroy sighed, and took refuge with her father. "I've done it, Mr. Armadale!" cried young Pedgift, greeting his patron gayly. "We can all go on the water together; I've got the biggest boat on the Broads. The little skiffs," he added, in a lower tone, as he led the way to the quay steps, "besides being ticklish and easily upset, won't hold more than two, with the boatman; and the major told me he should feel it his duty to go with his daughter, if we all separated in different boats. I thought that would hardly do, Sir," pursued Pedgift Junior, with a She stole a glance at Allan which said plainly enough, "The name is yours." Allan advanced a step nearer to her, and lowered his voice (without the slightest necessity) to a mys-respectfully sly emphasis on this word. “And, terious whisper. Miss Milroy instantly resumed her investigation of the ground. She looked at it with such extraordinary interest that a geologist might have suspected her of scientific flirtation with the superficial strata. besides, if we had put the old lady into a skiff with her weight (sixteen stone if she's a pound), we might have her upside down in the water half her time, which would have occasioned delay, and thrown what you call a damp on the pro "What name are you thinking of?" asked ceedings. Here's the boat, Mr. Armadale. What Allan. do you think of it ?" Miss Milroy addressed her answer, in the form of a remark, to the superficial strata-and let them do what they liked with it, in their capacity of conductors of sound. "If I had been a man," she said, "I should so like to have been called Allan!" She felt his eyes on her as she spoke, and, turning her head aside, became absorbed in the graining of the panel at the back of the carriage. "How beautiful it is!" she exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of interest in the vast subject of varnish. "I wonder how they do it!" Man persists, and woman yields. Allan declined to shift the ground from love-making to coach-making. Miss Milroy dropped the subject. "Call me by my name, if you like it," he whispered, perseveringly. "Call me 'Allan,' for once- just to try." She hesitated with a heightened color and a charming smile, and shook her head. "I couldn't just yet," she answered, softly. "May I call you Neelie? Is it too soon?" She looked at him again, with a sudden distarbance about the bosom of her dress, and a sudden flash of tenderness in her dark gray eyes. "You know best!" she said faintly, in a whis per. The inevitable answer was on the tip of Allan's tongue. At the very instant, however, when he opened his lips, the abhorrent high tenor of Pedgift Junior, shouting for "Mr. Armadale," rang cheerfully through the quiet air. The boat added one more to the strangely anomalous objects which appeared at the Broads. It was nothing less than a stout old life-boat, passing its last declining years on the smooth fresh water, after the stormy days of its youthtime on the wild, salt sea. A comfortable little cabin for the use of fowlers in the winter season had been built amidships, and a mast and sail adapted for the inland navigation had been fitted forward. There was room enough and to spare for the guests, the dinner, and the three men in charge. Allan clapped his faithful lieutenant approvingly on the shoulder; and even Mrs. Pentecost, when the whole party were comfortably established on board, took a comparatively cheerful view of the prospects of the picnic. "If any thing happens," said the old lady, addressing the company generally, "there's one comfort for all of us. My son can swim." The boat floated out from the creek into the placid waters of the Broad, and the full beauty of the scene opened on the view. On the northward and westward, as the boat reached the middle of the lake, the shore lay clear and low in the sunshine, fringed darkly at certain points by rows of dwarf trees, and dotted here and there, in the opener spaces, with windmills and reed-thatched cottages of puddled mud. Southward, the great sheet of water narrowed gradually to a little group of close-nestling islands which closed the prospect, while to the east a long, gently undulating line of reeds followed the windings of the Broad, and shut out all view of the watery wastes beyond. So clear and so light was the summer air that the one "My dear!" remonstrated the major. "We know nobody else in the neighborhood; and as Mr. Armadale kindly suggested our bringing our friends, what could we do?" cloud in the eastern quarters of the heaven was the smoke-cloud left by a passing steamer three miles distant and more on the inevitable sea. When the voices of the pleasure-party were still not a sound rose far or near but the faint ripple "We can't upset the boat," remarked young at the bows, as the men with slow, deliberate Pedgift, with sardonic gravity. "It's a lifestrokes of their long poles pressed the boat for-boat, unfortunately. May I venture to suggest ward softly over the shallow water. The world putting something into the reverend gentleman's and the world's turmoil seemed left behind for- mouth, Mr. Armadale? It's close on three ever on the land; the silence was the silence of o'clock. What do you say to ringing the dinenchantment-the delicious interflow of the soft purity of the sky and the bright tranquillity of the lake. ner-bell, Sir?" Never was the right man more entirely in the right place than Pedgift Junior at the picnic. stand-still among the reeds; the Thorpe-Ambrose hampers were unpacked on the roof of the cabin; and the current of the curate's eloquence was checked for the day. Established in perfect comfort in the boat-In ten minutes more the boat was brought to a the major and his daughter on one side, the curate and his mother on the other, and young Pedgift between the two-the water party floated smoothly toward the little nest of islands at the end of the Broad. Miss Milroy was in raptures; Allan was delighted; and the major for once forgot his clock. Every one felt pleasurably, in their different ways, the quiet and beauty of the scene; Mrs. Pentecost, in her way, feeling it like a clairvoyant-with closed eyes. "Look behind you, Mr. Armadale," whispered young Pedgift. "I think the parson's beginning to enjoy himself." How inestimably important in its moral results-and therefore how praiseworthy in itself is the act of eating and drinking! The social virtues centre in the stomach. A man who is not a better husband, father, and brother, after dinner than before, is, digestively speaking, an incurably vicious man. What hidden charms of character disclose themselves, what dormant amiabilities awaken when our common human An unwonted briskness—portentous apparent-ity gathers together to pour out the gastric juice! ly of coming speech-did certainly at that moment enliven the curate's manner. He jerked his head from side to side like a bird; he stopped and cleared his throat, and clasped his hands; he sighed, and looked at the company. Getting into spirits seemed, in the case of this excellent person, to be alarmingly like getting into the pulpit. "Even in this scene of tranquillity," said the Reverend Samuel, coming out softly with his first contribution to the society, in the shape of a remark, "the Christian mind-led, so to speak, from one extreme to another-is forcibly recalled to the unstable nature of all earthly enjoyments. How, if this calm should not last? How, if the winds rose and the waters became agitated?" "You needn't alarm yourself about that, Sir," said young Pedgift, "June's the fine season here-and you can swim." Mrs. Pentecost (mesmerically affected in all probability by the near neighborhood of her son) opened her eyes suddenly, and asked with her customary eagerness, "What does my boy say?" The Reverend Samuel repeated his words in the key that suited his mother's infirmity. The old lady nodded in high approval, and pursued her son's train of thought through the medium of a quotation. At the opening of the hampers from ThorpeAmbrose sweet Sociability (offspring of the happy union of Civilization and Mrs. Gripper) extended among the boating party, and melted in one friendly fusion the discordant elements of which that party had hitherto been composed. Now did the Reverend Samuel Pentecost, whose light had hitherto been hidden under a bushel, prove at last that he could do something by proving that he could eat. Now did Pedgift Junior shine brighter than even he had shone yet, in gems of caustic humor and exquisite fertilities of resource. Now did the squire, and the squire's charming guest, prove the triple connection between Champagne that sparkles, or that grows bolder, and Eyes whose vocabulary is without the word No. Now did cheerful old times come back to the major's memory, and cheerful old stories not told for years find their way to the major's lips. And now did Mrs. Pentecost, coming out wakefully in the whole force of her estimable maternal character, seize on a supplementary fork, and ply that useful instrument incessantly between the choicest morsels in the whole round of dishes, and the few vacant places left available on the Reverend Samuel's plate. "Don't laugh at my son," cried the old lady, observing the merriment which the proceedings produced among the company. "It's my fault, poor dear-I make him eat!" And there are men in this world who, seeing virtues such as these developed at the "Ah!" sighed Mrs. Pentecost, with infinite relish, "He rides the whirlwind, Sammy, and directs the storm!" "Noble words!" said the Reverend Samuel. table, as they are developed nowhere else, can, "Noble and consoling words!" "I say," whispered Allan, "if he goes on much longer in that way, what's to be done?" "I told you, papa, it was a risk to ask them," added Miss Milroy, in another whisper. nevertheless, rank the glorious privilege of dining with the smallest of the diurnal personal worries which necessity imposes on mankindwith buttoning your waistcoat, for example, or lacing your stays! Trust no such monster as |