Short Stories, - [books to read fiction .txt] 📗

(Belgravia.)

It has been said by the wise man of old that “there is no new thing under the sun.” If this means that the adventure I am about to relate was only a repetition of something that occurred to some other hapless damsel in the pre-historic ages, I herewith accord her my sincerest sympathies.

The intelligent reader must be kind enough to understand, as a preliminary, that I am impulsive, and apt to embrace opinions with a degree of enthusiasm and a total disregard of all adverse arguments, however weighty, that is truly feminine. When, therefore, shortly after leaving school, I, as my brother says, “took up” evolution, and read various abstruse treatises upon the “development of species” and the “descent of man,” it was in no half-hearted manner that I rode my hobby, but so thoroughly that I became a thorn in the flesh to most of my relations and friends, and my schoolboy brothers, denouncing the theory laconically, but forcibly, as “awful bosh,” bestowed upon me the contemptuous appellation of the “baboon,” and made unkind allusions to my frequent visits to the Regent’s Park Gardens as being paid to “next of kin.”

Certainly I did resort often, almost every day, to the monkey house to study the attributes of its interesting occupants. Perhaps some lingering, infatuated idea possessed me that it might be my brilliant mission to discover the “missing link;” at any rate, my note-book of that period contains many finely worded desires to “watch the agile monkey in its native habitat,” and to “trace the simian likeness to the human amid the primeval forests of another hemisphere.”

At length I was enabled to partially fulfill my dreams.

Having received a warm invitation from an old school friend to spend some weeks with her at her home in the West of Ireland, I started, with my maid as escort, for Ballynaghader. My friend, Marian Edwards, had married three years before, an Irish gentleman of some property, and I had never seen either her husband or herself since her marriage; so that it was with delightful anticipations of renewing an old friendship, and forming a new one, that I set out on my journey. My brothers accompanied me to the station, and sped me on my way with a unanimous wish that I might meet a gorilla or a chimpanze while taking my walks abroad in what they persisted in calling the “wilds.”

My maid, Hannah, was an estimable woman, very much privileged by reason of her long and faithful service; and as we neared our destination after a long and fatiguing journey, the details of which would be as tiresome as unnecessary, became overwhelmed with dismay, falling into tears, alleging between her sobs that P. C. B. 192 had told her the day before we started that Ireland was a country where nobody cared for the police. This was, in my worthy Hannah’s eyes, the climax of barbarism; and when she proceeded to state from “information received”—presumably from the same reliable source—“that being murdered in one’s bed” was considered in Ireland quite an ordinary and peaceful way of departing this life, I felt that it behooved me to assert myself, and, finding all soothing arguments of no avail, I administered a sharp scolding, which had the desired effect, and induced my abigail to dry her eyes, while she “hoped” with an incredulous snort and desponding shake of her head, “that things would turn out better than she expected.”

The prospective pleasure of my visit was largely enhanced by the discovery that Mr. Ardagh, whom I liked directly I saw him, was a great lover and student of zoölogy, and had quite a menagerie of tame and wild animals, to which he was constantly adding interesting specimens. I promised myself great pleasure in inspecting the animals and cultivating their acquaintance on the morrow, but was recalled from my pleasurable anticipations to devote all my attention to an account Marian was giving me of the mysterious loss of a very handsome and much-valued bracelet which had occurred that very day. Some hours before my arrival her maid had informed her that this bracelet, which had been recently under repair and had been returned that morning from the jeweler, was missing. It had been laid carelessly on the dressing-table when it arrived, and had disappeared. Search had been made in every likely and unlikely spot, servants had been questioned, and, as usual, under such circumstances, had all indignantly, and some tearfully, denied any knowledge of the missing trinket, which, apart from its intrinsic value, was dear to Marian from associations connected with it. I could suggest no steps for its recovery beyond the ordinary English alternative of communicating with the police. This, I found, had been already done, though evidently my friends had small hope of any good results following upon the exertions of that estimable force, of whom, according to Hannah, no one in Ireland stood in awe. Altogether it was an uncomfortable state of things; and although we discussed the subject in all its bearings, entering into the most minute details of any burglaries we had previously heard of or read about, we only succeeded in making ourselves distinctly uneasy, and had to decide at last, as at first, that it was most mysterious.

Directly after dinner I begged that I might be allowed to retire for the night, as my journey had thoroughly tired me. Marian took me to my room, and, wishing me a good night’s rest, left me to the ministrations of Hannah, whose equanimity was thoroughly restored, and who was in a state of discursive contentment, very trying to the patience of one whose eyes were closing fast under the soothing process of hair brushing, and