The Woman in White Page #4

								

perturbedly picking up the broken pieces of a teacup, which the
Professor had knocked off the table in his precipitate advance to meet
me at the door.

"I don't know what would have happened, Walter," said my mother, "if
you had delayed much longer.  Pesca has been half mad with impatience,
and I have been half mad with curiosity.  The Professor has brought
some wonderful news with him, in which he says you are concerned; and
he has cruelly refused to give us the smallest hint of it till his
friend Walter appeared."

"Very provoking: it spoils the Set," murmured Sarah to herself,
mournfully absorbed over the ruins of the broken cup.

While these words were being spoken, Pesca, happily and fussily
unconscious of the irreparable wrong which the crockery had suffered at
his hands, was dragging a large arm-chair to the opposite end of the
room, so as to command us all three, in the character of a public
speaker addressing an audience.  Having turned the chair with its back
towards us, he jumped into it on his knees, and excitedly addressed his
small congregation of three from an impromptu pulpit.

"Now, my good dears," began Pesca (who always said "good dears" when he
meant "worthy friends"), "listen to me.  The time has come--I recite my
good news--I speak at last."

"Hear, hear!" said my mother, humouring the joke.

"The next thing he will break, mamma," whispered Sarah, "will be the
back of the best arm-chair."

"I go back into my life, and I address myself to the noblest of created
beings," continued Pesca, vehemently apostrophising my unworthy self
over the top rail of the chair.  "Who found me dead at the bottom of
the sea (through Cramp); and who pulled me up to the top; and what did
I say when I got into my own life and my own clothes again?"

"Much more than was at all necessary," I answered as doggedly as
possible; for the least encouragement in connection with this subject
invariably let loose the Professor's emotions in a flood of tears.

"I said," persisted Pesca, "that my life belonged to my dear friend,
Walter, for the rest of my days--and so it does.  I said that I should
never be happy again till I had found the opportunity of doing a good
Something for Walter--and I have never been contented with myself till
this most blessed day.  Now," cried the enthusiastic little man at the
top of his voice, "the overflowing happiness bursts out of me at every
pore of my skin, like a perspiration; for on my faith, and soul, and
honour, the something is done at last, and the only word to say now
is--Right-all-right!"

It may be necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being
a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners,
and amusements.  Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial
expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever
they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for
their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound
words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into each
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