Chapter 48 - Page 2

the lady's consent must be secured before her father ceased to be a sound testator.

Now if Calpurnia had been kept in ignorance of this arrangement, a man possessing the figure, decision, stature, self-confidence, and other high attributes of our Mordacks, must have triumphed in a week at latest. But with that candor which appears to have been so strictly entailed in the family, Colonel Calpurnius called them in; and there (in the presence of the testator and of each other) they were fully apprised of this rather urgent call upon their best and most delicate emotions. And the worst of it was (from the gentleman's point of view), that the contest was unequal. The golden apples were not his to cast, but Atalanta's. The lady was to have the land, even without accepting love. Moreover, he was fifty per cent beyond her in age, and Hymen would make her a mamma without invocation of Lucina. But highest and deepest woe of all, most mountainous of obstacles, was the lofty skyline of his nose, inherited from the Roman. If the lady's corresponding feature had not corresponded--in other words, if her nose had been chubby, snub, or even Greek--his bold bridge must have served him well, and even shortened access to rosy lips and tender heart. But, alas! the fair one's nose was also of the fine imperial type, truly admirable in itself, but (under one of nature's strictest laws) coy of contact with its own male expression. Love, whose joy and fierce prank is to buckle to the plated pole ill-matched forms and incongruous spirits, did not fail of her impartial freaks. Mr. Mordacks had to cope with his own kin, and found the conflict so severe that not a breath of time was left him for anybody's business but his own.

If luck was against him in that quarter (although he would not own it yet), at York and Flamborough it was not so. No crisis arose to demand his presence; no business went amiss because of his having to work so hard at love. There came, as there sometimes does in matters pressing, tangled, and exasperating, a quiet period, a gentle lull, a halcyon time when the jaded brain reposes, and the heart may hatch her own mares'-nests. Underneath that tranquil spell lay fond Joe and Bob (with their cash to spend), Widow Precious (with her beer laid in), and Widow Carroway, with a dole at last extorted from the government; while Anerley Farm was content to hearken the creak of wagon and the ring of flail, and the rector of Flamborough once more rejoiced in the bloodless war that breeds good-will.

For Sir Duncan Yordas was a fine chess-player, as many Indian officers of that time were; and now that he was coming to his proper temperature (after three months of barbed stab of cold, and the breach of the seal of the seventy-seventh phial of Dr. Stirbacks), in gratitude for that miraculous escape, he did his very best to please everybody. To Dr. Upround he was an agreeable and penetrative companion; to Mrs. Upround, a gallant