LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Square. If he had looked the other way as he came out of his house he would have seen his son Lucius coming towards him not fifty yards off. Lucius was very unlike his father. He was a good-looking boy of about eighteen, tall and slim, with blue eyes and a pleasant smiling mouth fringed with a few fair downy hairs, of which he always spoke collectively. He was very popular among his school-fellows, and was commonly known by the name of "Lucy."

      "Halloa!" he said to himself as he caught sight of his father coming down the steps of the parental mansion. "Where's the governor off to, I wonder! Looks jolly smart, too. S'pose he's going to call on that old woman. Jove! he's got a pair of shiny boots on. I say, governor, you're going it! They're a bit too big for you though, my boy. Shall I give him a hail? Think I won't. He might want me to go and call on the old tabby with him."

      So Lucius let himself into the house and went upstairs. As he passed his father's room, the door of which was open, he looked in and saw that the floor was littered with the component parts of a pair of boot-trees. "Didn't know the governor went in for those luxuries," he said to himself. Then a sudden thought struck him; he went in and took up one of the pieces. "Well, I'm hanged!" he said in a tone of deep annoyance. "They are mine. And he's actually got on my boots. There's a piece of nerve for you! There'll be a row when you get home, young man. I really can't stand that, you know." And Lucius went out of his father's room very much annoyed.

      We left Mr. Binney making his way towards Woburn Square. He walked on until he came to a house with a brightly-painted blue door, where he rang the bell and asked if Mrs. Higginbotham was at home. The maid treated him with the subdued cordiality of an old acquaintance and led him straight upstairs to Mrs. Higginbotham's drawing-room, where her mistress was discovered warming her feet at a bright fire, and reading the Christian World. She was a stout, middle-aged lady, and wore a dress of rich black silk. The room wore an air of warm, solid comfort. Its decorations would not have satisfied the late Mr. William Morris, it is true, but as they completely satisfied Mrs. Higginbotham, that was not a matter of great importance.

      "Dear me, Mr. Binney, this is very kind of you," said Mrs. Higginbotham, rising to greet her visitor.

      Mr. Binney shook hands with her and took the chair to which she had motioned him. He did not speak, but the compressed upper lip and the thoughtful look with which he regarded Mrs. Higginbotham caused a slight fluttering in that lady's ample bosom. With a woman's instinct she immediately knew as surely as if he had already told her what he had come to say. "He's going to do it to-day," she said to herself, and true to the tactics of her sex she set herself at once to ward off the critical moment as long as possible. She plunged into conversation of the sprightly religious order, for Mrs. Higginbotham was a good woman and could talk by the hour together of preachers and movements and causes, in which conversation Mr. Binney was quite capable of holding his own, for he and Mrs. Higginbotham sat under the same preacher and held the same theological views. There was another point in common between them, and while Mrs. Higginbotham is struggling to maintain a bright and lively conversation, to which Mr. Binney replies only by terse monosyllables, there will be time to explain what this was.

      Both Mr. Binney and Mrs. Higginbotham had a soul above their surroundings. In the case of Mr. Binney this has already been indicated by the way in which, while conducting his business on the most approved lines of commercial progress, he essayed to import into it something better and nobler than the mere pushing of his wares and the piling up of a fortune. Those cartoons from Raphael had infused a love of art into many humble homes, and not a few minds had been enriched by the perusal of Binney's Shakespeare (a play given away with every sack of his food for poultry), to such an extent that the deterioration of eyesight brought about by the quality of paper and print with which those masterpieces were issued was a very small matter in consideration of the mental enlightenment which had been diffused throughout the country.

      Mrs. Higginbotham's aspirations were not of so educational a character. Her literary yearnings were satisfied by the weekly appearance of the Family Herald Supplement, to which event she looked forward regularly with great pleasure. That excellent periodical never made its appearance in her drawing-room, although sundry works of fiction from the lending library round the corner, dealing with the habits and customs of the aristocracy, did. Mrs. Higginbotham's father had been a draper in a small way of business, and her husband, beginning life in her father's shop, by the time he died had become a draper in a very large way. Wealth and luxury had been Mrs. Higginbotham's lot for many years, but what she yearned for was the larger, freer life led by those happy beings of whom she read in her chosen novels. To be able to look upon a lord without blinking; to be able to look upon lords every day of your life; to have it said in a newspaper, "I saw Mrs. 'Fluffy' Higginbotham" (Fluffy had been the term of endearment enjoyed by the late Mr. Higginbotham) "sitting under the Achilles Statue in a plum-coloured gown with lettuce-green revers;" to have cards of invitation pouring in, every other one illuminated by a title; to regard the London season as something more than the time of year when the days were getting longer and it would soon be time to think about going to the seaside—comfortable as Mrs. Higginbotham's circumstances were, her life had been singularly devoid of these delights.

      And this was not all. Mrs. Higginbotham was romantic. She revelled in a love-story. She adored the Apollo-like heroes of her favourite fiction with an ungrudging wealth of admiration, and she envied hardly less the blushing heroines on whom they lavished the stores of their magnificent affections. Mrs. Higginbotham felt that it ought to be the lot of every girl to be a blushing heroine at one time of her life. She felt that she herself had been unjustly deprived of that privilege, although she had been an attractive girl, and, if she read the expression in Peter Binney's eyes rightly, was attractive still. The late Mr. Higginbotham had been a good husband to her, but his actual proposal had been of the "Here I am—Take me if you like—If you don't there are plenty that will, and only too glad to get the chance" order. She had taken him, but he had never satisfied the romantic cravings of her nature. She, on her part, had been a good wife to him, but so far as she was aware he had never, from first to last, regarded her as a heroine, or if he had he had never shown it.

      Would Peter Binney do more? Was it too late to hope that a whiff of the fragrant breezes of romance might yet blow upon her? Mrs. Higginbotham scarcely knew. There was a something in the little man that inclined her to think that he would not be averse to dally in the Indian summer of a romantic courtship if she made it quite plain to him that that was what she required; and there was a something, in spite of his diminutive stature and the byegone forty-five years of his successful life, in the fire of his eye and in his erect and proud bearing, that whispered to Mrs. Higginbotham's heart that she might, by guarding the sensation with extreme care, bring herself to regard him as a very good substitute for the youthful adorer who it was almost too much to hope would come forward at this time of day.

      While these questions passed through her mind, Mrs. Higginbotham went on talking, and Mr. Binney, answering her without knowing in the least what she was talking about, mentally braced himself up for the proposal he was about to make. At last he broke into the middle of one of Mrs. Higginbotham's sentences, and said in a firm and resolute voice, "Mrs. Higginbotham, ma'am."

      Mrs. Higginbotham saw that the time had come, and gave up the struggle.

      "Yes, Mr. Binney?" she said in as cool a tone as she could muster.

      "I am not so young as I was, ma'am," said Mr. Binney.

      "We are none of us that," said Mrs. Higginbotham. "At least not people at our time of life."

      "You have no reason to complain, ma'am," said Mr. Binney gallantly.

      "My heart is young," said Mrs. Higginbotham, greatly pleased at the compliment, "and if I am not very much mistaken, yours is also."

      "I hope it is," said Mr. Binney, greatly pleased in his turn; "and on that account I have a proposal to make to you, ma'am, which I hope you will consider favourably."

      "I'm sure I shall do that, whatever it is," said Mrs. Higginbotham comfortably.

      "I hope so," said Mr. Binney again. "The fact is, ma'am, that I have long regarded you with feelings of interest, which have in the course of time developed into feelings of affection. I can scarcely

Скачать книгу