A Little Rebel | Page 2

idea, he picks his glasses out of the sugar and goes back to the letter.
"You will find her the dearest girl. Most loving, and tender-hearted; and full of life and spirits."
"Good heavens!" says the professor. He puts down the letter again, and begins to pace the room. "'Life and spirits.' A sort of young kangaroo, no doubt. What will the landlady say? I shall leave these rooms"--with a fond and lingering gaze round the dingy old apartment that hasn't an article in it worth ten sous--"and take a small house--somewhere--and ... But--er----It won't be respectable, I think. I--I've heard things said about--er--things like that. It's no good in looking an old fogey, if you aren't one; it's no earthly use"--standing before a glass and ruefully examining his countenance--"in looking fifty if you are only thirty-four. It will be a scandal," says the professor mournfully. "They'll cut her, and they'll cut me, and--what the deuce did Wynter mean by leaving me his daughter? A real live girl of seventeen! It'll be the death of me," says the professor, mopping his brow. "What"----wrathfully----"that determined spendthrift meant, by flinging his family on my shoulders, I----Oh! Poor old Wynter!"
Here he grows remorseful again. Abuse a man dead and gone, and one, too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor, was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father who was always only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the chance seems but a poor thing. The professor's quarrel with his father had been caused by the young man's refusal to accept a Government appointment--obtained with some difficulty--for the very insufficient and, as it seemed to his father, iniquitous reason, that he had made up his mind to devote his life to science. Wynter, too, was a scientist of no mean order, and would, probably, have made his mark in the world, if the world and its pleasures had not made their mark on him. He had been young Curzon's coach at one time, and finding the lad a kindred spirit, had opened out to him his own large store of knowledge, and steeped him in that great sea of which no man yet has drank enough--for all begin, and leave it, athirst.
Poor Wynter! The professor, turning in his stride up and down the narrow, uncomfortable room, one of the many that lie off the Strand, finds his eyes resting on that other letter--carelessly opened, barely begun.
From Wynter's solicitor! It seems ridiculous that Wynter should have had a solicitor. With a sigh, he takes it up, opens it out and begins to read it. At the end of the second page, he starts, re-reads a sentence or two, and suddenly his face becomes illuminated. He throws up his head. He cackles a bit. He looks as if he wants to say something very badly--"Hurrah," probably--only he has forgotten how to do it, and finally goes back to the letter again, and this time--the third time--finishes it.
Yes. It is all right! Why on earth hadn't he read it first? So, the girl is to be sent to live with her aunt after all--an old lady--maiden lady. Evidently living somewhere in Bloomsbury. Miss Jane Majendie. Mother's sister evidently. Wynter's sisters would never have been old maids if they had resembled him, which probably they did--if he had any. What a handsome fellow he was! and such a good-natured fellow too.
The professor colors here in his queer sensitive way, and pushes his spectacles up and down his nose, in another nervous fashion of his. After all, it was only this minute he had been accusing old Wynter of anything but good nature. Well! He had wronged him there. He glances at the letter again.
He has only been appointed her guardian, it seems. Guardian of her fortune, rather than of her.
The old aunt will have the charge of her body, the--er--pleasure of her society--he, of the estate only.
Fancy Wynter, of all men, dying rich--actually rich. The professor pulls his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the scientific world--and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far--has enabled him to improve upon. It has helped him to live, no doubt, and distinctly outside the line of want, a thing to be grateful for, as his family having in a measure abandoned him, he, on his part, had abandoned his family in a measure also (and with reservations), and it would have been impossible to him, of all men, to confess himself beaten, and return to them for assistance of any kind. He could never have enacted the part of the prodigal son. He knew this in earlier days, when husks were for the most part