"Well, you carry your age badly," retorted the old man, not to be beaten.
"What does he say, my dear?" said the poor old lady turning to Mrs. Mesurier.
"You carry your age badly," shouted the determined old man; "she should see our Esther, shouldn't she, Mary?"
The silence here of the young people was positively electric with suppressed laughter. Two of them escaped to explode in another room, and Esther and her mother were left to save the situation. But on such occasions as these Mrs. Mesurier grew positively great; and the manner in which she contrived to "turn the conversation," and smooth over the terrible hiatus, was a feat that admits of no worthy description.
Presently the old man rose to go, as the clock neared five. He had promised to be home before dark, and Esther would think him "benighted" if he should be late. He evidently had been to America and back in that short afternoon.
"Well, Mary, good-bye," he said; "one never knows whether we shall meet again. I'm getting an old man."
"Eh, Uncle Clegg, you're worth twenty dead ones yet," said Mrs. Mesurier, reassuringly.
"What a strange old gentleman!" said Mrs. Turtle, somewhat bewildered, as this family apparition left the room.
"Good-bye, Uncle Clegg," Esther was heard singing in the hall. "Good-bye, be careful of the steps. Good-bye. Give our love to Aunt Esther."
Then the door would bang, and the whole house breathe a gigantic sigh of humorous relief.
(This was the kind of thing girls at home had to put up with!)
"Well, mother, did you ever see such a funny old person?" said Esther, on her return to the parlour.
"You mustn't laugh at him," Mrs. Mesurier would say, laughing herself; "he's a good old man."
"No doubt he's good enough, mother dear; but he's unmistakably funny," Esther would reply, with a whimsical thought of the family tree. Yes, they were a distinguished race!
No, the Mesuriers had absolutely nothing to hope for from their relations,--nothing to look back upon, less to look forward to. Most families, however poor and even _bourgeois_, had some memories to dignify them or some one possible contingency of pecuniary inheritance. At the very least, they had a ghost-story in the family. You seldom read the biographies of writers or artists without finding references, however remote, to at least one person of some distinction or substance. To have had even a curate for an ancestor, or a connection, would have been something, some frail link with gentility.