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I AM FREE OF MABEL HARKER—RETURN TO “THE FRENCH HORN”—DISASTROUS INTERFERENCE OF HAROLD FORSYTH IN MY AFFAIRS

It was the 13th of October, as I very well remember, that, shortly after Mabel’s return to England from Switzerland, she wrote me an incoherent epistle, begging me to come up to town and see her at once, for that she was the most miserable of girls and had sad news for me, signed “your heartbroken Mabel.” I must say I was glad to hear it, and greatly looked forward to the sad news; since I very well knew it could only be that another wooer had stepped up on to the Regent’s Park tapis, and one a good deal more determined to win her than I. Directly I got there and found the fire wasn’t lit in the drawing-room, though it was horribly cold, I knew I was right, and the interview was meant to be brief and painful.

It was the same room, by-the-way (though the fire had been lit for us then!) in which I had made my unfortunate declaration in the early spring, soon after Easter—a declaration precipitated by Mabel, who began playing the piano, but soon broke down over it and wept, alleging me to be the cause of her unhappiness; which, being uncommon tender-hearted where the sex are concerned, completely bowled me over and drove me to propose.

When she came in this time, with melancholy mouth but unmistakably triumphant eyes, she at once told me the sad news; to which I listened with as gloomy a face as I could, demanding in hoarse tones the name of my successful rival. I could scarcely contain my mirth when I heard it was Byles, the man she had so often laughed at in her letters from Lucerne, as girls not infrequently do at the man they are one day destined to marry. But I must say I think she might at any rate have offered to send me my presents back, for there are many of them (particularly a diamond and sapphire ring—cost me eighteen pounds) I should have liked to have given Lucy. I make no manner of doubt that if it had been garnets and carnelian, I should have had it back at once in a registered letter.

Directly our painful interview was over, I hurried back to Nesshaven and “The French Horn,” feeling happier than I had done for months past, a free man, and my heart beating so rapturously I believe an old lady in the carriage with me heard it, she looked so frightened at my restlessness.

But at “The French Horn” a blow awaited me, from which, when I think of it, I yet reel; for judge of my stupor when, on my gay return, I was met, not by Lucy, towards whom I was so impetuously rushing to tell all, but by the whiskified thunders of Mr. Thatcher, who took me at once into the bar-parlor, and proceeded there and then to claw me about the ears with the angry rhetoric of a theatrically outraged heavy father.

Of course he was quite right; but then I was myself now quite right, too; and when he talked in real Adelphi fashion about stealing affections and repaying him in this way, I was—thank Heaven!—in a position to be angry too, and give him as good as he gave me.

So I let him fume on till he ran himself down, when I temperately explained what my position really was, and how I was altogether free; and how, above all, that if Lucy cared for me, as I very well knew she did, I was going to marry her at once, and (if not precisely in the immediate neighborhood of “The French Horn”) settle down and live happily ever after.

Whereupon Mr. Thatcher’s easily corrugated brow began as easily to clear, and he steadied himself and seized and shook me by the wrong hand. So we sat down and had a cigar and a split whiskey-and-soda, and he was good enough to say he had known all along (from the way I had always paid my bill, I suppose) that he could trust me implicitly, and all would come right in the end.

But in the meantime he had shipped off dear Lucy to her aunt’s school in the Ladbroke Grove Road, where she had gone back—very tearfully, poor child, at the news of my supposed treachery—to her altogether uncongenial employment with the younger children.

By judicious pumping I discovered it was Harold Forsyth who had blown upon me and “queered my pitch,” as showmen say, having come over from Colchester to play golf, and been seized upon by the watchful Thatcher, who of course had noticed my unremitting attentions to his daughter. Upon which Harold, either because he fancied it his duty (old friends are often very inconsiderate) or from sheer stupidity, had let slip the disastrous news of my engagement to another lady; though, as a matter of fact, at the very moment of their conversation it was off and I was free.

Old Mrs. Thatcher took the situation in at a glance, and, either from a natural desire to see her granddaughter properly settled or from pure friendship for me, who had always been attentive to her, and once took a bee out of her hair (that animal being almost the only living thing she really feared), immediately suggested I should go off at once to the Ladbroke Grove Road, provided with a letter to the aunt from Mr. Thatcher, in which everything was explained, and I was given authority to interview and settle matters with my dear sweetheart. So, next morning early, off I drove to Nesshaven Station in the milk cart, gay as a lark—that chorister of the poor and the cheerful well-to-do—and by twelve o’clock was rattling in a cab down the Ladbroke Grove Road.