One Maid's Mischief. Fenn George Manville

my dear old friend,” said the doctor, “let me ask you, treating you as Mary’s nearest relative, will you give your consent to our marriage?”

      “No, Arthur, you cannot,” said the little lady, firmly. “I could not leave you.”

      “But I have an offer to make you, my dear old friend,” said the doctor; “the chaplaincy at our station is vacant; will you come out with us and take it? There will be no separation then, and – ”

      He stopped short, for at his words the Reverend Arthur seemed to be galvanised into a new life. He started from his seat, the listless, saddened aspect dropped away, his eyes flashed, and the blood mounted to his cheeks.

      “Come with you?” he cried. “Chaplaincy? Out there?”

      It seemed as if he had been blinded by the prospect, for the next moment he covered his face with his hands, and sank back in his seat without a word.

      “I knew it!” cried little Miss Rosebury, in reproachful tones; and, leaving her chair, she clung to her brother’s arm. “I told you he could not break up his old home here. No, no, Arthur, dear Arthur, it is all a foolish dream! I do not wish to leave you – I could not leave you. Henry Bolter, pray – pray go,” she said, piteously, as she turned to the doctor. “We both love you dearly as our truest friend; but you place upon us burdens that we cannot bear. Oh, why – why did you come to thus disturb our peace? Arthur, dear brother, I will not go away!”

      “Hush! hush, Mary!” the curate said, from behind his hands. “Let me think. You do not know. I cannot bear it yet!”

      “My dear old Arthur,” began the doctor.

      “Let me think, Harry, let me think,” he said, softly.

      “No, no, don’t think!” cried the little lady, almost angrily. “You shall not sacrifice yourself for my sake! I will not be the means of dragging you from your peaceful happy home – the home you love – and from the people who love you for your gentle ways! Henry Bolter, am I to think you cruel and selfish instead of our kind old friend?”

      “No, no, my dear Mary!” cried the doctor, excitedly. “Selfish? Well, perhaps I am, but – ”

      “Hush!” said the curate softly; and again, “let me think.”

      A silence fell upon the little group, and the chirping of the birds in the pleasant country garden was all that broke that silence for many minutes to come.

      Then the Reverend Arthur rose from his seat and moved towards the door, motioning to them not to follow him as he went out into the garden, and they saw him from the window go up and down the walks, as if communing with all his familiar friends, asking, as it were, their counsel in his time of trial.

      At last he came slowly back into the room, where the elderly lovers had been seated in silence, neither daring to break the spell that was upon them, feeling as they did how their future depended upon the brother’s words.

      They looked at him wonderingly as he came into the room pale and agitated, as if suffering from the reaction of a mental struggle; but there was a smile of great sweetness upon his lips as he said, softly:

      “Harry, old friend, I never had a brother. You will be really brother to me now.”

      “No, no!” cried his sister, excitedly. “You shall not sacrifice yourself like this!”

      “Hush, dear Mary,” he replied calmly; “let me disabuse your mind. You confessed to me your love for Harry Bolter here. Why should I stand in the way of your happiness?”

      “Because it would half kill you to be left alone.”

      “But I shall not be left alone,” he cried, excitedly. “I shall bitterly regret parting from this dear old home; but I am not so old that I could not make another in a foreign land.”

      “Oh! Henry Bolter,” protested the little lady, “it must not be!”

      “But it must,” said her brother, taking her in his arms, and kissing her tenderly. “There are other reasons, Mary, why I should like to go. I need not explain what those reasons are; but I tell you honestly that I should like to see this distant land.”

      “Where natural history runs mad, Arthur,” cried the doctor, excitedly. “Hurrah!”

      “Oh, Arthur!” cried his sister, “you cannot mean it. It is to please me.”

      “And myself,” he said, quietly. “There; I am in sober earnest, and I tell you that no greater pleasure could be mine than to see you two one.”

      “At the cost of your misery, Arthur.”

      “To the giving of endless pleasure to your husband and my brother,” said the Reverend Arthur, smiling; and before she could thoroughly realise the fact, little quiet Miss Mary Rosebury was sobbing on the doctor’s breast.

      Volume One – Chapter Thirteen.

      On the Voyage

      In these busy days of rail and steam, supplemented by their quick young brother electricity, time seems to go so fast that before the parties to this story had thoroughly realised the fact, another month had slipped by, another week had been added to that month, the Channel had been crossed, then France by train, and at Marseilles the travellers had stepped on board one of the steamers of the French company, the Messageries Maritimes, bound for Alexandria, Aden, Colombo, Penang, and then, on her onward voyage to Singapore and Hong Kong, to drop a certain group of her passengers at the mouth of the Darak river, up which they would be conveyed by Government steamer to Sindang, the settlement where Mr Harley, her Britannic Majesty’s Resident at the barbaric court of the petty Malay Rajah-Sultan Murad had the guidance of affairs.

      It was one of those delicious, calm evenings of the South, with the purple waters of the tideless Mediterranean being rapidly turned into orange and gold. Away on the left could be seen, faintly pencilled against the sky, the distant outlines of the mountains that shelter the Riviera from the northern winds. To the right all was gold, and purple, and orange sea; and the group seated about the deck enjoying the comparative coolness of the evening knew that long before daybreak the next morning they would be out of sight of land.

      There were a large number of passengers; for the most part English officials and their families returning from leave of absence to the various stations in the far East; and as they were grouped about the spacious quarter-deck of the sumptuously-fitted steamer rapidly ploughing its way through the sun-dyed waters, the scene was as bright and animated as painter could depict.

      Gentlemen were lounging, smoking, or making attempts to catch the fish that played about the vessel’s sides without the slightest success; ladies were seated here and there, or promenading the deck, while other groups were conversing in low tones as they drank in the soft, sensuous air, and wondered how people could be satisfied to exist in dull and foggy, sunless England, when nature offered such climes as this.

      “In another half-hour, Miss Perowne, I think I shall be able to show you a gorgeous sunset, if you will stay on deck.”

      The speaker was a tall, fair man by rights, but long residence in the East had burned his skin almost to the complexion of that of a Red Indian. He was apparently about forty, with high forehead, clear-cut aquiline features, and the quick, firm, searching look of one accustomed to command and master men.

      He took off his puggree-covered straw hat as he spoke, to let the cool breeze play through his hair, which was crisp and short, but growing so thin and sparse upon the top that partings were already made by time, and he would have been looked upon by every West-end hair-dresser as a suitable object to be supplied with nostrums and capillary regenerators galore.

      “Are the sunsets here very fine?” said Helen, languidly, as she lay back in a cane chair listlessly gazing through her half-closed eyes at the glittering water that foamed astern, ever widening away from the churning of the huge propeller of the ship.

      “Very grand some of them, but nothing to those we shall show you in the water-charged atmosphere close to the equator. Ah, Miss Stuart, come here and stop to see the sunset. You grieve me, my child,” he