‘The fewer the better,’ said Mr. Erin. He meant it for an encouragement, no doubt, a sort of ‘so far the Court is with you,’ but it had not an encouraging effect upon his son. It seemed to him that he had just swallowed a pint of vinegar.
‘Leave off those damnable faces and begin,’ exclaimed Mr. Erin. It was only a quotation from his favourite bard, and not an inappropriate one, but it did not sound kind.
‘It is brutal,’ murmured Margaret under her breath, and at the same time she cast a glance of ineffable pity at the victim. It was like a ray of sunshine upon a chill day, at sight of which the bird bursts into song.
‘The lines are on Chatterton,’ he began by way of prelude:—
Comfort and joys for ever fled, He ne’er will warble more; Ah me! the sweetest youth is dead That e’er tuned reed before. The hand of misery laid him low, E’en hope forsook his brain; Relentless man contemned his woe, To him he sighed in vain. Oppressed with want, in wild despair he cried, ‘No more I’ll live!’ swallowed the draught, and died.
Mr. Samuel Erin looked as if he had swallowed a draught; one of those recommended to persons suffering from the effects of poison.
‘Shade of Shakespeare!’ he cried, ‘do you call that a poem?’
William Henry murmured something in mitigation about its being an acrostic. The old gentleman’s sense of hearing was not acute, and led him to imagine he was being reproached for his surliness. He turned as red as a turkey-cock.
Margaret also flushed to her forehead; she too had misunderstood what her cousin had said, and the more easily because the words she thought he had used (a cross stick) were so appropriate. But how could he, _could_ he, be so foolish as thus to give reins to his temper!
Lastly, Frank Dennis became a brilliant scarlet. He was half suffocated with suppressed laughter. Still, true to his mission of peacemaker, he contrived to splutter out that when a poem was an acrostic, such perfection was not to be looked for as when the muse was unfettered.
‘Oh, that’s it, is it?’ said Mr. Erin grimly. ‘I’ve heard of young men wasting their time, and, what is worse, the time of their employers, in many ways; but that they should take to writing acrostics seems to me the _ne plus ultra_ of human folly. Bah! give me a dish of tea.’