Lotta Schmidt, and Other Stories. Anthony Trollope

Lotta Schmidt, and Other Stories

have it so.” By this time he had brought her back into the room, and was walking up and down the length of the saloon with her. “But it is no use our walking about here,” she said. “I was just going home, and now, if you please, I will go.”

“Not yet, Lotta.”

“Yes; now, if you please.”

“But why are you not supping with them?”

“Because it did not suit me. You see there are four. Five is a foolish number for a supper party.”

“Will you sup with me, Lotta?” She did not answer him at once. “Lotta,” he said, “if you sup with me now you must sup with me always. How shall it be?”

“Always? No. I am very hungry now, but I do not want supper always. I cannot sup with you always, Herr Crippel.”

“But you will to-night?”

“Yes, to-night.”

“Then it shall be always.”

And the musician marched up to a table, and threw his hat down, and ordered such a supper that Lotta Schmidt was frightened. And when presently Carl Stobel and Marie Weber came up to their table—for Fritz Planken did not come near them again that evening—Herr Crippel bowed courteously to the diamond-cutter, and asked him when he was to be married. “Marie says it shall be next Sunday,” said Carl.

“And I will be married the Sunday afterwards,” said Herr Crippel. “Yes; and there is my wife.”

And he pointed across the table with both his hands to Lotta Schmidt

“Herr Crippel, how can you say that?” said Lotta.

“Is it not true, my dear?”

“In fourteen days! No, certainly not. It is out of the question.”

But, nevertheless, what Herr Crippel said came true, and on the next Sunday but one he took Lotta Schmidt home to his house as his wife.

“It was all because of the zither,” Lotta said to her old mother-in-law. “If he had not played the zither that night I should not have been here now.”

THE ADVENTURES OF FRED PICKERING.

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THE ADVENTURES OF FRED PICKERING.

HERE was something almost grand in the rash courage with which Fred Pickering married his young wife, and something quite grand in her devotion in marrying him. She had not a penny in the world, and he, when he married her, had two hundred and fifty pounds, and no profession. She was the daughter of parents whom she had never seen, and had been brought up by the kindness of an aunt, who died when she was eighteen. Distant friends then told her that it was her duty to become a governess; but Fred Pickering intervened, and Mary Crofts became Mary Pickering when she was nineteen years old. Fred himself, our hero, was six years older, and should have known better and have conducted his affairs with more wisdom. His father had given him a good education, and had articled him to an attorney at Manchester. While at Manchester he had written three or four papers in different newspapers, and had succeeded in obtaining admission for a poem in the “Free Trader,” a Manchester monthly magazine, which was expected to do great things as the literary production of Lancashire. These successes, joined, no doubt, to the natural bent of his disposition, turned him against the law; and when he was a little more than twenty-five, having then been four years in the office of the Manchester attorney, he told his father that he did not like the profession chosen for him, and that he must give it up. At that time he was engaged to marry Mary Crofts; but of this fact he did not tell his father. Mr. Pickering, who was a stern man—one not given at any time to softnesses with his children—when so informed by his son, simply asked him what were his plans. Fred replied that he looked forward to a literary career—that he hoped to make literature his profession. His father assured him that he was a silly fool. Fred replied that on that subject he had an opinion of his own by which he intended to be guided. Old Pickering then declared that in such circumstances he should withdraw all pecuniary assistance; and young Pickering upon this wrote an ungracious epistle, in which he expressed himself quite ready to take upon himself the burden of his own maintenance. There was one, and only one, further letter from his father, in which he told his son that the allowance made to him would be henceforth stopped. Then the correspondence between Fred and the ex-governor, as Mary used to call him, was brought to a close.

Most unfortunately there died at this time an old maiden aunt, who left four hundred pounds a-piece to twenty nephews and nieces, of whom Fred Pickering was one. The possession of this sum of money strengthened him in his rebellion against his father. Had he had nothing on which to begin, he might probably even yet have gone to the old house at home, and have had something of a fatted calf killed for him, in spite of the ungraciousness of his letter. As it was he was reliant on the resources which Fortune had sent to him, thinking that they would suffice till he had made his way to a beginning of earning money. He thought it all over for full half an hour, and then came to a decision. He would go to Mary—his Mary—to Mary who was about to enter the family of a very vulgar tradesman as governess to six young children with a salary of twenty-five pounds per annum, and ask her to join him in throwing all prudence to the wind. He did go to Mary; and Mary at last consented to be as imprudent as himself, and she consented without any of that confidence which animated him. She consented simply because he asked her to do so, knowing that she was doing a thing so rash that no father or mother would have permitted it.

“Fred,” she had said, half laughing as she spoke, “I am afraid we shall starve if we do.”

“Starving is bad,” said Fred; “I quite admit that; but there are worse things than starving. For you to be a governess at Mrs. Boullem’s is worse. For me to write lawyers’ letters all full of lies is worse. Of course we may come to grief. I dare say we shall come to grief. Perhaps we shall suffer awfully—be very hungry and very cold. I am quite willing to make the worst of it. Suppose that we die in the street! Even that—the chance of that with the chance of success on the other side, is better than Mrs. Boullem’s. It always seems to me that people are too much afraid of being starved.”

“Something to eat and drink is comfortable,” said Mary. “I don’t say that it is essential.”

“If you will dare the consequences with me, I will gladly dare them with you,” said Fred, with a whole rhapsody of love in his eyes. Mary had not been proof against this. She had returned the rhapsody of his eyes with a glance of her own, and then, within six weeks of that time, they were married. There were some few things to be bought, some little bills to be paid, and then there was the fortnight of honeymooning among the lakes in June. “You shall have that, though there were not another shot in the locker,” Fred had said, when his bride that was to be had urged upon him the prudence of settling down into a small lodging the very day after their marriage. The fortnight of honeymooning among the lakes was thoroughly enjoyed, almost without one fearful look into the future. Indeed Fred, as he would sit in the late evening on the side of a mountain, looking down upon the lakes, and watching the fleeting brightness of the clouds, with his arm round his loving wife’s waist and her head upon his shoulder, would declare that he was glad that he had nothing on which to depend except his own intellect and his own industry. “To make the score off his own bat; that should be a man’s ambition, and it is that which nature must have intended for a man. She could never have meant that we should be bolstered up, one by another, from generation to generation.” “You shall make the score off your own bat,” Mary had said to him. Though her own heart might give way a little as she thought, when alone, of the danger of the future, she was always brave before him. So she enjoyed the fortnight of her honeymooning, and when that was over set herself to her task with infinite courage. They went

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