CHAPTER IV.

THE DEAN AT THE TABLE.

THE Dean had not said a word from which it was possible to infer that he was not quite alone at Cambridge, so the astonishment of Reuben may be imagined when, on entering the drawingroom, he found his grandmamma Blanche waiting to receive him. This totally unexpected meeting with his old flame, now placed in so singular a relation towards him,-one so utterly inconsistent with the slightest remnant of the feelings which she formerly inspired (even making such feelings absolutely ridiculous)— might well have fluttered a less susceptible young man than Reuben Medlicott. This was his first meeting with Blanche since she made her strange marriage; indeed since the day he left that unfortunate essay on shoemakers upon her table, in which he had but too incautiously disclosed the state of his heart. Fortunately the circumstances of the meeting prevented the embarrassment (which was in some degree mutual) from taking a sentimental turn. It was impossible to be sentimental in Dean Wyndham's company; and the near approach of dinner, with the presence of Hyacinth Primrose, had a further tendency to place the intercourse between Reuben and Mrs. Wyndham at once upon a rational and easy foundation. In fact, ere dinner was announced, Reuben's agitation was nearly over; and before the close of the evening, he was almost on the same terms with Blanche as he might have been with any other handsome young woman who had taken a fancy to marry the old Dean. Blanche was greatly improved by matrimony, but not so much in her person, perhaps, as in her air and manners. The little state of the matron became her; its independence and dignity had communicated a graceful firmness to her deportment; and though she still had that soft, earnest expression in her eyes, there was an animation in them now which was no doubt due to her enlarged experience of life, and a corresponding freedom and spirit in her conversation, to be attributed, of course, to the same cause. Her style of dress was altered considerably; as became the wife of a clergyman and dignitary of the church, she was attired with extreme but most becoming simplicity, no longer in the gayest hues of the season, as when she was one of the three Sherries.

Two bonnets were lying on a sofa, with other miscellaneous

female properties, seemingly thrown there, because, in an hotel, the bedroom was probably at a considerable distance. Mrs. Wyndham saw Reuben's eye directed to the bonnets.

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I am not the only lady of our party," she said, smiling. "Where's Catherine?" cried the Dean, almost at the same

instant.

Reuben was alarmed, thinking that Catherine was in all probability the eldest Miss Barsac, of whom he retained a disagreeable recollection. But his alarm was only of momentary duration, for the door opened, and in came the woman, whom of all others, next to his mother, he would have wished her to prove his bountiful and blooming aunt Mountjoy. She had scarcely time to embrace him, when the Dean seized her arm and led her into the dining-room, through a door which a servant had just thrown open. Primrose presented his arm to his old acquaintance, Mrs. Wyndam. Probaby a more agreeable party of five never met at a dinner-table. The Dean, no doubt, talked more than his share; but as he eat more than his share also, he left the rest considerable opportunities of conversing, and they were not neglected. Reuben, seated between his pretty grandmother and his charming aunt, from both of whom he had been so long separated, basking in the Dean's capricious favour, and with the most intimate and most brilliant of his university friends near him, could not have been much happier had he been at a feast of nectar and ambrosia in one of the Islands of the Blest. He appeared indeed that day to great advantage, confirmed the opinion of his talents which almost everybody was disposed to entertain, and pleased Mrs. Mountjoy so very much, that, although she was not in the habit of writing to her sister, she could not refrain the next day from doing so, for the pleasure of letting her know what she thought of her nephew, what a splendid future she predicted for him, and what an engaging young man he already was.

Mrs. Mountjoy was one of those women of whom it is impossible to speak in too flattering terms-impossible to think of without wishing to be near them-impossible to sit beside without extreme danger of falling in love with, unless, like Reuben, you happened to be a nephew, which alters the matter. Her beauties were ample, and her heart was large in proportion. In short, she was an angel all but the wings; and a stout pair of pinions it would have taken to have borne a seraph of her proportions through the empyrean.

The Dean, though he seemed sometimes to forget himself, and

Reu

treat Blanche on the footing of a child, patting her on the head, or chucking her under the chin, was manifestly influenced by her, and very much to his advantage, in more ways than one. ben could see at a glance that his grandfather was wonderfully softened since the period when he knocked the boys about at Mrs. Barsac's evening parties; and his aunt privately informed him that though she attributed the change partly to the society of his young wife, she considered it still more owing to the improvement of his circumstances by the addition of Blanche's fortune, and to a temporary withdrawal from his building speculations, by which he had burnt his fingers so severely. This was a mere conjecture of his daughter's, and not very well founded, as we shall soon have occasion to know.

"But hush, the Dean is talking, and we must listen, my dear," said Mrs. Mountjoy, stopping in the midst of her domestic explanations.

The Dean was talking of fluency as a result and a symptom of shallowness. "Full men," he said, " are seldom fluent. They are eloquent, but eloquence and fluency are different things. Young men discourse fluently in proportion to their ignorance, not to their knowledge, of a subject. There is no more worthless or more dangerous acquirement than eloquence in the vulgar sense of the word. Bruce remarked of the Abyssinians, 'that they were all orators,'' as indeed,' he adds, ' are most barbarians.' The observation is extremely applicable to an unfortunate country not a thousand miles off, with which we are very closely connected. I have always thought the great misfortune of that country was that when the family of the Shallows settled there, the family of Master Silence did not accompany them."

All laughed-Primrose was particularly amused by this fancy of the Dean's, and said he had no notion so much about Ireland was to be learned from Shakspeare.

"His plays are full of Irish characters," said the Dean. "What do you say of such swaggering poltroons as Pistol and Parolles, or that facetious, foul-mouthed blusterer, Thersites? Are they not Irish to the back-bone? Can't you fancy Pistol member for Limerick, and Thersites representing the city of Dublin?"

"But, sir," said Reuben, "speaking of Homer's Thersites, is not that a very effective speech which he makes in the first book of the Iliad ?"

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Very effective," muttered the Dean, "but only in bringing down the staff of Ulysses upon the speaker's shoulders. Homer

makes Thersites the representative of talent without worth, eloquence without character. Pope well observes that had Ulysses made the same speech, the troops would have sailed that night for Greece. Character is to an individual what position is to a general. The world asks who a man is before it gives him an audience, or at least before it hears him a second time. We must not only take thought what we say, but from whence we say it. Even in society, the prosperity of a jest depends upon the consideration of the man who makes it, often upon his place at the table. Young men ought to reflect upon this, and take more pains to make themselves respected than admired."

Primrose tried to draw out the Dean on the question of Catholic Emancipation, but upon that subject he was reserved, and what he did say was oracular and ambiguous. He dropped it soon, and preferred giving an account of his varrious honeymoon expeditions, swinging himself about on his chair in his original manner, and threatening destruction to all the glasses and decanters within the reach of his arms. His last excursion, with Blanche, had been in Switzerland. Primrose was amazed at the feats of pedestrianism performed by a man considerably upwards of sixty, and could scarcely believe some of them, though solemnly attested by his wife. One of his walks was from Lauterbrunnen over the Wengern Alp, to the summit of the Faulhorn, “no journey that of a sabbath day." Blanche accompanied him on horseback. She had followed him also on another great excursion to the glaciers of the Rhone.

“I never saw a mountain in my life," said the Dean, "that I did not get to the top of it, if it was possible; when I was first in Switzerland, I was a very young man, and if I did not ascend Mont Blanc, it was not that the mountain was so high, but that my pockets were so low. The ascent is an expensive thing, for you must take a regiment of guides with you. Another passion of mine was for the sources of rivers. I have seen the sources of most of the great rivers of Europe. Had I devoted myself to it, I would have discovered the springs of the Nile long ago. I

have no doubt of it."

"But you have been in Egypt, sir?" said Reuben.

"Yes, but not on a matrimonial excursion. I went further up the Nile than any man living, and I have seen more of Palestine than any man living either; I was on the top of Mount Sinai, which nobody in Europe has to say but myself. In fact, there is nothing that I have not done in the way of travelling; I

rode everything rideable, shot everything shootable, swam everything swimmable, climbed everything climbable, and eat everything eatable, in every country I visited."

"I believe, sir," said Mrs. Mountjoy, married you went to Scotland."

"when you were first

Mrs. Mountjoy and Mrs. Medlicott were the Dean's daughters by his second wife; his first marriage was very early in life; it bore no fruit, and seemed now even to himself an occurrence of ancient history.

"I was married in Scotland," said the Dean, in reply to his daughter's observation.

"Not at Gretna, I hope, sir," said Hyacinth Primrose.

"Not at Gretna; all was regular; but it was in Scotland, so that I took the tour of the Highlands. Nobody ever travelled so far north in Scotland as I did; I visited every lake, all the islands, and from the Calton Hill to the loftiest peak in the country, if it was a sin to do homage to nature on the high places, I committed that sin upon every one of them. But it is not nature we worship in such scenes, but the God of nature, and that is only the true religion. My second honeymoon I spent in the Pyrenees, so that there's a chain of mountains for you for every chain in which Hymen bound me."

"You will take your next wife to the Himalayas, sir," said Blanche quietly and pleasantly.

"Not further than the Andes," said the Dean, laughing, with a swing of one of his arms that knocked his glass of claret off the table. "No," he added, with a vigorous sigh, never minding the glass, "I'll ascend no more mountains. My mountaineering days are over."

His young wife probably thought that he might have said his marrying days were over, but he cautiously confined his pledge to the ascent of mountains.

"Who will say or sing, henceforward," said Hyacinth Primrose to his friend the following morning, "that

Wint'ry age and youth

Ne'er can dwell together?

I am heartily glad to see the Dean so happy with his young wife. What a fine old fellow he is !"

"Hyacinth," said Reuben, "you have been very successful in your gallery of personal sketches in the 'Cambridge Miscellany,' you ought to do my grandfather."