AUSTIN CHASUBLE’S LOVE CHANCE.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 6, 6 June 1874, Page 3

AUSTIN CHASUBLE’S LOVE CHANCE.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.—I. One should try to be contented, Mrs Bosely. We are all given what is needful for us, you know. ‘ So we be, sir, so wo be ; but the draught do come in at that ’ere door dreadful, it do. I feels it across my lines like the stroke of a stick, no less.’ ‘Well, jnn must sneak to vonr hindlord ; and if he won’t do anything, be patient. Patience is’—&c., &c. Thus I, curate of St Stephen’s-in-the-West, to Mrs Bosely, ex-laundress and present out-door pauper, in No. 3 Jinks’alley, sitting on one of Mrs Bosely’s bottomless cane chairs, and uttering weak platitudes by way of soothing Mrs Bosely’s complaints. Do not sneer, my reader. Is it not the special province of a curate to utter the said mildly moral sentences, and sit on bottomless chairs for a given period out of every twentyfour hours ? ‘Silence the complaint by relieving the want!’ My friend, every old woman in the parish has a draughty door with which she would not part for the diamond mines of Golconda. Were I to give Mrs Bosely a shilling, and bid her have her door mended, she would spend it in snuff, and go on complaining. Were I to send a man to do it—l don’t know, but I think she would resist actively, and, if overcome, would possibly take cold and die. And, meanwhile, Mrs Smith and Mrs Jones, and Mrs Black, have each their draughty door. For all these reasons I quietly balanced myself on my purgatorial chair, and said that which was expected from me. Mrs Bosely’s room was about six feet square, and smelt strongly of herring and cabbage, result probably of Mrs Bosely’s dinner. The window, two panes of sooty glass, was shut and wedged, my hostess objecting on principle to fresh air. I had had no dinner, no lunch even, having been ‘ visiting’ since breakfast. My feet were in a pool of water, which had oozed in from under Mrs Bosely’s door. Something nearly allied, unless my shrinking senses deceived me, to the Norfolk Howard family was leisurely patrolling the back of my neck. The preserved perfumes of dinner and Jinks’ alley made me feel sickish ; but it was Mrs Bosely’s day for ten minutes’ clerical comfort, and ten minutes she must accordingly have. ‘ And my rheumatics, sir,’ pursued the dame, plaintively, ‘they be that dreadful I can’t abide ’em. They crockles one all up like, they does.’ ‘ Your share of this world’s afflictions, Mrs Bosely,’ said I, settling my Roman collar, for the ten minutes were nearly up. ‘ Rheumatism is a very painful thing, but one ought to count it a privilege to bear the crosses which— ’

I had got thus far when I was interrupted by a sharp knock at the door. ‘ There’s the taxes, drat ’em !’ cried Mrs Bosely, forgetting her pastor’s presence in natural irritability. 1 Come in, do.’ And accordingly there came in, not the taxes, but a beautiful girl, about nineteen ; a girl with big, blue, lambent eyes ; with a sweet, flushed face, oval shaped, and dimpled like a baby’s ; with parted dewy lips, and great masses of glossy bronzed plaits coiled away under the sweeping plume of her broad felt hat ; a girl to take away your breath, and make you curse the mud on your boots, and the missing button on your ecclesiastical waistcoat.

4 Lord ha’ mercy !’ quoth Mrs Bosely, ‘if ’tisn’t my young lady. An’ how be you, my dear ?’

‘All right, thanks,’ said Mrs Bosely’s young lady, in a cheerful, rather loud voice —as, without glancing at me, she shook the dame’s stiff, wrinkled fingers in her small, lavender-kidded hand. ‘ How is the rheumatism ? ’

‘ Mortal bad, miss, mortal bad ! ’ replied Mrs Bosely, delighted to begin all over

again to a new auditor. ‘I can’t abear’era, an’ that’s the truth I tell you. They does crockle one up like.’ ‘Ah, just what they were doing the last time I saw you, grannie,’said the young lady, coolly, ‘And as they are no better, and that ‘crackling’ propensity must be '■•■ry unpleasant. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Have you ever beard of a Turkish bath ? ’ ‘A what, miss?’ asked Mrs Boscly, to whom the word ‘ bath ’ souuded very much as it might to one of those hydrophobic hounds with whom Mr Grantley Berkeley used to bore us so much a little while ago in the ‘ Times.’

‘ A Turkish bath,’ repeated the girl, w ith cheerful distinctness, while I sat in silence —and did not laugh. ‘My uncle is older than you are, and has Just had several, which have done him no end of good. You’re put into hot water first, I think, and then cold is soused—’

To he, continued.