‘AND TO THE DINNER FASTE THEY HEM SPEDDE.’
Mr. MacCloskie’s suggestions for new hot-houses at Goring Abbey were
on so large a scale as to necessitate a good deal of consultation with
architect and builder before the new constructions and alterations of
existing structures were put in hand. The head gardener at South Hill
had tried his hardest to secure the whole organisation and direction of
the work for himself, and to have large powers in the choice of the men
who were to carry it out.
‘Ye’ll not need any architect, Mr. Goring, if ye’ll joost let me
explain my mind to the builder,’ said this modest Caledonian.
‘Architects know a deal about the Parthenon and the Temple of the
Winds, and that kind of old-fashioned classical stuff, but there’s not
one of ’em knows how to plan a good workable hot-house, or to build a
flue that won’t smoke when the wind’s contrary. Architects are very
good for the fronts of clubhouses and ceevil-service stores, and that
like; but if you trust your new houses to an architect, I’ll give odds
when they’re done there’ll be no place for me to put my coals. If
you’ll just give me free scope——’
‘You are very good, Mr. MacCloskie,’ answered Gerald with velvety
softness, ‘but my father was a thoroughly practical man, and I believe
he knew as much of the science of construction as any man living; yet
he always employed an architect when he wanted anything built for
himself, were it only a dustbin. I’ll stick to his lines.’
‘Very well, sir, you must please yourself. But an orchid-house is a
creetical thing to build. The outside of it may be as handsome as St.
Peter’s at Rome; but your orchids won’t thrive unless they like the
inside arrangements, and for them ye’ll want a practical man.’
‘I’ll get a practical man, Mr. MacCloskie; you may be sure of that,’
answered Gerald, ineffably calm, though the Scot was looking daggers.
The morning before Mrs. Ferrers’s family dinner was devoted to the
architect, who came down from London to Goring Abbey, expressly to
advise and be instructed. He was entertained at luncheon at the Abbey;
and Lina drove over under her aunt’s wing to meet him, while Gerald’s
thoroughbred hack—a horse of such perfect manners that it mattered very
little whether his rider had hands or no hands—ambled along the turfy
borders of the pleasant country road beside the phaeton.
Daphne had her day all to herself, since, knowing her to be alone at
South Hill, Edgar had no excuse for going there; and, as Mr. Turchill
argued with himself, a man must give some portion of his life to the
dearest old mother and the most picturesque old house in the county.
So, Edgar, with his fancies flying off and circling about South Hill,
contrived to spend a moony day at home, mending his fishing-rods,
reviewing his guns, writing a few letters, and going in and out of
his mother’s homely old-fashioned morning-room twenty times between
breakfast and luncheon.
Mrs. Turchill had been invited to the family dinner at Arden Rectory,
and had accepted the invitation, though she was not given to
dissipation of any kind, and she and her son found a good deal to say
about the coming feast during Edgar’s desultory droppings-in.
‘I hope you’ll like her, mother,’ said Edgar, stopping, with a gun in
one hand and an oily rag in the other, to look dreamily across the moat
to the quiet meadows beyond, where the dark red Devon cows contrasted
deliciously with the fresh green turf sprinkled with golden buttercups
and silvery marguerites.
‘Like her!’ echoed Mrs. Turchill, lifting her soft blue eyes in mild
astonishment from her matronly task of darning one of the best damask
table-cloths. ‘Why she is the sweetest girl I know. I would have given
ten years of my life for you to have married her.’
This was awkward for Edgar, who had spoken of Daphne, while Mrs.
Turchill thought of Madoline.
‘Not with my consent, mother,’ he said, laughing, and reddening as he
laughed. ‘I couldn’t have spared a single year. But I wasn’t speaking
of Madoline just then. I know of old how fond you are of her. I was
talking of poor little Daphne, whom you haven’t seen since she came
from her French school.’
‘French school!’ exclaimed Mrs. Turchill contemptuously. ‘I hate the
idea of those foreign schools, regular Jesuitical places, where they
take girls to operas and theatres and give them fine notions,’ pursued
the Saxon matron, whose ideas on the subject were slightly mixed. ‘Why
couldn’t Sir Vernon send her to the Misses Tompion, at Leamington?
That’s a respectable school if you like. Good evangelical principles,
separate bedrooms, and plain English diet. I hope the French school
hasn’t spoilt Daphne. She was a pretty little girl with bright hair, I
remember, but she had rather wild ways. Something too much of a tomboy
for my taste.’
‘She was so young, mother, when you saw her last, not fifteen.’
‘Well, I suppose French governesses have tamed her down, and that she’s
pretty stiff and prim by this time,’ said Mrs. Turchill with chilling
indifference.
‘No, mother, she is a kind of girl whom no training would ever make
conventional. She is thoroughly natural, original even, and doesn’t
mind what she says.’
‘That sounds as if she talked slang,’ said Mrs. Turchill, who, although
the kindest of women in her conduct, could be severe of speech on
occasion, ‘and of all things I detest slang in a woman. I hope she is
industrious. The idleness of the young women of the present day is a
crying sin.’
Edgar Turchill seemed hardly to be aware of this last remark. He was
polishing the gun-metal industriously with that horrible oily rag which
accompanied him everywhere on his muddling mornings at home.
‘She’s accomplished, I suppose,’ speculated Mrs. Turchill—‘plays, and
sings, and paints on velvet.’
‘Ye—es; that’s to say I’m not sure about the velvet,’ answered Edgar
faintly, not remembering any special artistic performances of Daphne’s
except certain attempts on a drawing-block, which had seemed to him too
green and too cloudy to lead to much, and which he had never beheld in
an advanced stage. ‘She is awfully fond of reading,’ he added in rather
a spasmodic manner, after an interval of silent thought. ‘The poetry
she knows would astonish you.’
‘That would be easy,’ retorted Mrs. Turchill. ‘My father and mother
didn’t approve of poetry, and Cowper, Thomson, and Kirke White were the
only poets allowed to be read by us girls at old Miss Tompion’s—these
ladies are nieces of my Miss Tompion, you know, Edgar.’
‘How can I help knowing it, mother, when you’ve told me a hundred and
fifty times?’ exclaimed her son, more impatiently than his wont.
‘Well, Edgar, my dear, if you’re tired of my conversation—’
‘No, you dear peppery old party, not a bit. Go on like an old dear as
you are. Only I thought you were rather hard upon poor little Daphne
just now.’
‘How can I be hard upon her, when I haven’t seen her for the last three
years! Dear, dear, what a small place Leamington was in my time,’
pursued Mrs. Turchill, musing blandly upon the days of her youth; ‘but
it was much more select. None of these rich people from Birmingham;
none of these Londoners coming down to hunt; but a very superior
class—invalids, elderly people who came to drink the waters, and to
consult Doctor Jephson.’
‘It must have been lively,’ murmured Edgar, not deeply interested.
‘It was not lively, Edgar, but it was select,’ corrected Mrs. Turchill
with dignity, as she paused with her head on one side to admire the
neatness of her own work.
She was the kindest and best of mothers, but Edgar felt on this
particular occasion that she was rather stupid, and a trifle narrow in
her ideas. A purely rustic life has its disadvantages, and a life which
is one long procession of placid prosperous days, knowing little more
variety than the change of the seasons, is apt to blunt the edge of the
keenest intellect. Mrs. Turchill ought to have been more interested in
Daphne, Edgar thought.
‘She will be delighted with her when she sees her,’ he reasoned,
comforting himself. ‘Who can help being charmed with a girl who is so
thoroughly charming?’
And then he took up his gun and his rag, and strolled away to another
part of the roomy old house, so soberly and thoroughly old-fashioned,
not with the gimcrack spurious old fashion of to-day, but with the
grave ponderous realities of centuries ago—walls four feet thick,
deeply-recessed windows, massive untrimmed joists, low ceilings,
narrow passages, oak wainscoting, inconveniences and shortcomings
of all kinds, but the subtle charm of the remote past, the romantic
feeling of a house that has many histories, pervading everything.
Edgar would not have changed Hawksyard and his three thousand a-year
for Goring Abbey and a million. The house and the land around it—or at
any rate the land—had belonged to his race from time immemorial, far
back in the dim days of the Heptarchy. Tradition held that the first
of the Turchills had been a sokeman who possessed a yard of land on
the old feudal tenure, one of his obligations being that he should
breed hawks for the king’s falconers, and thus the place had come
in time to be called Hawksyard, long after the last hawk bred there
had flown away to join some wild branch of the honey-buzzard family
in the tree-tops of primeval Arden, and the yard of land had swelled
into a very respectable manor. Edgar rather liked to believe that the
founder of his race had been a sokeman, who had held thirty acres of
land from the king at a penny an acre, and had furnished labourers for
the royal harvest, and had ridden up and down the field with a wand in
his hand to see that his men worked properly. This curious young man
was as proud of Turchill the sokeman as of Turchill the high sheriff.
If it was a humble origin its humility was of such ancient date that
it became distinction. Turchill of the thirty acres was like Adam,
or Paris, or David. In the long line of the Turchills whose bones
were lying in the vaults below Hawksyard Church there had been men
distinguished in the field, the Church, and the law; men who had fought
on sea and land; men who had won power in the State, and used it well,
true alike to king and commons. But the ruck of the Turchills had been
country squires like Edgar, and Edgar’s father; men who farmed their
own land and lived upon it, and who had no ambitions and few interests
or desires beyond their native soil.
Hawksyard was a real moated grange. The house formed three sides of a
quadrangle, with a heavily buttressed garden wall for the fourth side.
The water flowed all round the solid base of the building, a wide deep
moat, well stocked with pike and eels, carp and roach. The square inner
garden was a prim parterre of the seventeenth century, and there was
not a flower grew there more modern than Lord Bacon’s day. This was a
Turchill fancy. All the novelties of nineteenth-century horticulture
might flourish in the spacious garden on the other side of the moat;
but this little bit of ground within the gray old walls was a sacred
enclosure, dedicated to the spirit of the past. Here the old yew-trees
were clipped into peacocks. Here grew rosemary; lavender; periwinkle,
white, purple, and blue; germander; flags; sweet marjoram; primroses;
anemones; hyacinths; and the rare fritillaria; double white violets,
which bloom in April, and again at Bartholomew-tide; gilliflowers;
sweetbrier; and the musk-rose. Here the brazen sun-dial, on its
crumbling stone pedestal, reminded the passer-by that no man is always
wise. Here soft mosses, like tawny velvet, crept over the gray relics
of an abbey that had been destroyed soon after the grange was built—the
stone coffin of a mitred abbot; the crossed legs of a knightly
crusader, with a headless heraldic dog at his feet. Here was the small
circular fish-pond into which the last of the abbots was supposed to
have pitched headforemost, and incontinently drowned himself, walking
alone at midnight in a holy trance.
Mrs. Turchill was almost as fond as Edgar was of Hawksyard; but her
affection took a commonplace turn. She was not to the manner born.
She had come to the grange from a smart nineteenth-century villa, and
though she was very proud of the grave old house of which her husband
had made her the mistress, her pride was mingled with an idea that
Hawksyard was inconvenient, and that its old fashion was a thing to be
apologised for and deprecated at every turn. Her chief delight was in
keeping her house in order; and her servants were drilled to an almost
impossible perfection in every duty appertaining to house-cleaning.
Nobody’s brasses, or oak floors, or furniture, or family plate, or
pewter dinner-service, ever looked so bright as Mrs. Turchill’s.
Nowhere were windows so spotless; nowhere was linen so exquisitely
white, or of such satin-like smoothness. Mrs. Turchill lived for these
things. When she was in London, or at the sea-side, she would be
miserable on rainy days at the idea that Jane or Mary would leave the
windows open, and that the brass fenders and fire-irons were all going
to ruin.
Edgar spent a moony purposeless day, dawdling a good deal in the garden
on the other side of the moat, where the long old-fashioned borders
were full of tall white lilies and red moss-roses, vivid scarlet
geranium, heliotrope and calceolaria, a feast of sweet scents and
bright colours. There was a long and wide lawn without a flower bed on
it—a level expanse of grass; and on the side opposite the flower border
there was a row of good old mulberry and walnut trees; then came a
light iron fence, and a stretch of meadow land beyond it. The grounds
at Hawksyard made no pretence of being a park. There was not even a
shrubbery, only that straight row of old trees, standing up out of the
grass, with a gravel walk between them and the fence, across which
Edgar used to feed and fondle his cows, or coax the shy brood mares and
their foals to social intercourse.
He looked round his domain doubtfully to-day, wondering if it were
good enough for Daphne, this poor table-land of a garden, a flat lawn,
a long old-fashioned border crammed with homely flowers, the yew-tree
arbour at the end of yonder walk. How poor a thing it seemed after
South Hill, with its picturesque timber and extensive view, its broad
terrace and sloping lawn, its rich variety of shrubs and conifers!
‘It isn’t because I am fond of the place that she would care for it,’
he told himself despondently. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing romantic or
striking about it—except the moat. I’m glad she’s so fond of water.’
Edgar smoked a cigarette or two under the mulberry-trees, looked at his
cows, talked to some of his men, and thus contrived to wear away the
afternoon till the clock over the gateway struck five.
‘Mother’s tea-time. I’ll go and have a cup with her,’ he said to
himself.
Going out to dinner was a tremendous piece of business with Mrs.
Turchill. She was more serious and solemn about it than a strictly
modern lady would feel about going to be married. Even in an
instance of this kind, where the dinner was supposed to be entirely
unceremonious, a friendly little gathering arranged on the spur of the
moment, she was still full of fuss and preparation. She had spent an
hour in her bed-chamber before luncheon, arranging and discussing with
her maid Deborah what gown she would or would not wear on the occasion;
and this discussion involved a taking out and unfolding of all her
dinner-gowns, and an offering of divers laces upon divers bodices, to
see which went best with which. A review of this kind generally ended
by a decision in favour of black velvet, or satin, or silk, or brocade,
as the case might be; Mrs. Turchill being much richer in gowns than in
opportunities for wearing them.
‘I always like myself best in black,’ she would say, with a glance at
the reflection of her somewhat florid complexion in the Chippendale
glass.
‘You always look the lady in your velvet, mum,’ Deborah would answer
sententiously.
Then after a day of quiet usefulness about her house the worthy matron
would collect her energies over a leisurely cup of tea, and perhaps
allow herself the refreshment of a nap after her tea, before she began
the solemn business of the toilet.
The carriage had been ordered for a quarter past seven, though it was
but half an hour’s drive to Arden Rectory, and at seven o’clock Mrs.
Turchill was seated in the white parlour, in all the dignity of her
velvet gown and point-lace cap, her hereditary amethysts, supposed to
be second only to those once possessed by George the Third’s virtuous
consort, and her scarlet and gold Indian shawl. She was a comely
matron, with a complexion that had never been damaged by cark or
care, gas or late hours: a rosy-faced country-bred dame, with bright
blue eyes, white teeth, and plentiful brown hair, in which the silver
threads were hardly visible.
Edgar was standing by the open window, just where he had stood in the
morning with his gun, sorely perplexed as to the disposal of those
fifteen minutes which had to be got through before the most punctual of
coachmen would bring the carriage to the door. The London papers were
lying unheeded on the table; but Edgar had felt very little interest of
late in the welfare of nations, or even in the last dreadful murder in
Whitechapel.
‘I hope my cap is right,’ said Mrs. Turchill anxiously.
‘How could it be wrong, mother, when you’ve Deborah and your
looking-glass, and have never been known to dress yourself in a hurry?’
‘I dislike doing anything in a hurry, Edgar. It is against my
principles. But I never feel sure about the set of my cap. I am
afraid Deborah’s eye is not quite correct, and a glass is dreadfully
deceiving. I wish you’d look, Edgar, if it isn’t too much trouble.’
This was said reproachfully, as her son was kneeling on the window-seat
staring idly down into the moat, as if he wanted to discover the
whereabouts of an ancient pike that had evaded him last year.
‘My dear mother,’ he exclaimed, turning himself about to survey her,
‘to my eye—which may be no better than Deborah’s—that lace arrangement
which you call a cap appears mathematically exact, as precise as your
own straight, honest mind. There’s Dobson with the carriage. Come
along, mother.’
He led her out, established her comfortably in her own particular seat
in the large landau, and seated himself opposite to her with a beaming
countenance.
‘How happy you look, Edgar!’ said Mrs. Turchill, wondering at this
unusual radiance. ‘One would think it were a novelty for you to dine
out. Yet I am sure,’ somewhat plaintively, ‘you don’t very often dine
at home.’
‘The Rectory dinners are not to be despised, mother.’
‘Mrs. Ferrers is an excellent manager, and does everything very nicely;
but as you don’t much care what you eat that would hardly make you so
elated. I am rather surprised that you care about meeting Madoline and
Mr. Goring so often,’ added Mrs. Turchill, who had not quite forgiven
Lina for having refused to marry her son.
That is the worst of making a confidante of a mother. She has an
inconveniently long memory.
‘I have nothing but kindly feelings for either of them,’ answered
Edgar. ‘Don’t you know the old song, mother—“Shall I, wasting in
despair, die because a woman’s fair?” I don’t look much like wasting in
despair, do I, old lady?’
‘I should be very sorry to see you unhappy, Edgar; but I shall never
love any wife of yours as well as I could have loved Madoline.’
‘Don’t say that, mother. That’s too hard on the future Mrs. Turchill.’
This was a curious speech from a youth who six months ago had protested
that he should never marry. But perhaps this was only Edgar’s fun. Mrs.
Turchill shared the common delusion of mothers, and thought her son a
particularly humorous young man.
What a sweetly Arcadian retreat Arden Rectory looked on this fair
summer evening, and how savoury was the odour of a _sole au gratin_
which blended with the flowery perfumes of the low-panelled hall! The
guests had wandered out through the window of the small drawing-room
to the verandah and lawn in front of it. That long French window was a
blot upon the architectural beauty of the half-timbered Tudor cottage,
but it was very useful for circulation between drawing-room and garden.
Mrs. Ferrers and Madoline were sitting under the verandah; Daphne was
standing a little way off on the lawn talking to the Rector and Gerald
Goring. She was speaking with intense animation, her face full of
brightness. Edgar darted off to join the group, directly he had shaken
hands with the two ladies, leaving his mother to subside into one of
those new-fangled bamboo chairs which she felt assured would leave its
basket-work impression on her velvet gown.
‘Edgar,’ cried Daphne as he came towards her, ‘did you ever hear of
such a heathen—a man born on the soil—a very pagan?’
‘Who is the culprit?’ asked Edgar; ‘and what has he done?’
‘Mr. Goring has never seen Ann Hathaway’s cottage.’
‘I don’t believe he knew who Ann Hathaway was till we told him,’ said
the Rector, with his fat laugh.
‘And he has ridden and driven through Shottery hundreds of times, and
he never stopped to look at the cottage where Shakespeare—the most
wonderful man in the whole world—wooed and won his wife.’
‘I have heard it dimly suggested that she wooed and won him,’ remarked
Gerald placidly; ‘she was old enough.’
‘You are too horrid,’ cried Daphne. ‘Would you be surprised to hear
that Americans cross the Atlantic—three thousand miles of winds and
waves and sea-sickness—on purpose to see Stratford-on-Avon, and
Shottery, and Wilmcote, and Snitterfield?’
‘I could believe anything of a Yankee,’ answered Gerald, unmoved by
these reproaches. ‘But why Wilmcote? why Snitterfield? They are as poky
little settlements as you could find in any agricultural district.’
‘Did you ever hear of such hideous ignorance?’ cried Daphne, ‘and in
a son of the soil. You are most unworthy of the honour of having been
raised in Shakespeare’s country. Why John Shakespeare was born at
Snitterfield, and Mary Arden lived with her father at Wilmcote; and it
was there he courted her.’
‘John—Mary—oh, distant relations of the poet’s, I suppose?’ inquired
Gerald easily.
‘This is revolting,’ exclaimed Daphne; ‘but he is shamming—he must be
shamming.’
‘Punish him for his ignorance, whether it is real or pretended,’ cried
Edgar. ‘Make him row us all down to Stratford to-morrow morning; and
then we’ll walk him over to Shottery, and make him give a new gown to
the nice old woman who keeps the cottage.’
‘A new gown,’ echoed Daphne contemptuously; ‘he ought to be made to
give her a cow—a beautiful mouse-coloured Channel Island cow.’
‘I’ll give her anything you like, as long as you don’t bore me to death
about Shakespeare. I hate sights and lions of all kinds. I went through
Frankfort without looking at the house where Goethe was born.’
‘A depraved desire to be singular,’ said the Rector. ‘I think he ought
to forfeit a cow to Mrs. Baker. Rhoda, my love,’ glancing furtively at
his watch, ‘our friends are all here. Todd is usually more punctual.’
Mrs. Ferrers, Lina, and Mrs. Turchill had strolled out to join the
others. The prim rustic matron was looking at Daphne with astonishment
rather than admiration. She was pretty, no doubt. Mrs. Turchill had
never seen a more transparent complexion, or lovelier eyes; but there
was a reckless vivacity about the girl’s manner which horrified the
thoroughly British matron.
‘Daphne,’ said Edgar, ‘I hope you haven’t forgotten my mother. Mother,
this is Daphne.’
Mrs. Turchill drew back a pace or two with extreme deliberation,
and sank gracefully in the curtsy which she had been taught by the
Leamington dancing-master—an undoubted Parisian—five-and-thirty years
ago. After the curtsy she extended her hand and allowed Daphne to shake
it.
‘Come, Mrs. Turchill,’ said the Rector, offering his arm. ‘Goring,
bring Miss Lawford; Turchill will take care of my wife; and Daphne’—he
paused, smiling at the fair young face and slender girlish figure in
soft white muslin—‘Daphne shall have my other arm, and sit on my left
hand. I feel there is a bond of friendship between us now that I find
she is so fond of Shakespeare.’
‘I’m afraid I know Hamlet’s soliloquies better than I do my duty to my
neighbour,’ said Daphne, on the way to the dining-room, remembering how
the Rector used to glower at her under his heavy brows when she broke
down in that portion of the Church Catechism.
Mrs. Ferrers, from her opposite seat at the oval table, had a full view
of her husband’s demeanour, across the roses and maidenhair ferns and
old Derby crimson and purple dessert dishes. It was rather trying to
her to see that he devoted himself entirely to Daphne during the pauses
of the meal; and that, while he as in duty bound provided for all Mrs.
Turchill’s corporeal needs, and was solicitous that she should do ample
justice to his wines and his dishes, he allowed her mind to starve upon
the merest scraps of speech dropped into her ear at long intervals.
Nor was Edgar much better behaved to Mrs. Ferrers, for he sank into
such a slough of despond at finding himself separated from Daphne,
that his conversational sources ran suddenly dry, and Rhoda’s lively
inquiries about the plays and pictures he had just been seeing elicited
only the humiliating fact that she, who had not seen them, knew a great
deal more about them than he who had.
‘What did you think of the Millais landscape?’ she asked.
‘Was there a landscape by Millais? I thought he was a portrait painter.’
This looked hopeless, but she tried again.
‘And Frith’s picture; you saw that of course.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he replied, brightening; ‘but I saw the people looking
at it. It was immensely good, I believe. There was a railing, and a
policeman to make the people move on. My mother was delighted. She and
another lady trod on each other’s gowns in their eagerness to get at
the picture. I believe they would have come to blows, if it hadn’t been
for the policeman.’
‘And there was Miss Thompson’s picture.’
‘Yes; and another crowd. That is the sort of picture mother enjoys. I
think the harder the struggle is the better she likes the picture.’
Gerald and Madoline were sitting side by side, talking as happily
as if they had been in Eden. All the world might have heard their
conversation—there were no secrets, there was no exchange of
confidences—and yet they were as far away from the world about them,
and as completely out of it, as if they had been in the planet Venus,
rising so calmly yonder above the willows, and sending one tremulous
arrow of light deep down into the dark brown river. For these two
Mrs. Todd’s most careful achievements were as nothing. Her _sole
au gratin_ might have been served with horse-radish sauce—or fried
onions; her _vol-au-vent_ might have been as heavy as suet-pudding; her
_blanquette_ might have been bill-sticker’s paste; her _soufflé_ might
have been flavoured with peppermint instead of _vanille_; and they
would hardly have discovered that anything was wrong.
And what delight it was by-and-by to wander out into the cool garden,
leaving the Rector to prose to poor Edgar over his Chambertin, and to
lose themselves in the shadowy shrubbery, where the perfume of golden
broom and mock orange seemed intensified by the darkness. Daphne sat
in the quaint old candle-lit drawing-room conversing with the two
matrons—Aunt Rhoda inclined to lecture; Mrs. Turchill inclined to
sleepiness, having eaten a more elaborate dinner than she was used to,
and feeling an uncomfortable tightness in the region of her velvet
waistband.
Edgar got away from the Rector as soon as he decently could, and came
to the relief of the damsel.
‘Well, mother, how are you and Daphne getting on?’ he asked cheerily.
‘I hope you have made her promise to come to see you at Hawksyard.’
Mrs. Turchill started from semi-somnolence, and her waistband gave a
little creak.
‘I shall be delighted if Madoline will bring her sister to call on
me some day,’ she replied stiffly, addressing herself to nobody in
particular.
‘Call on you—some day! What an invitation!’ cried Edgar. ‘Why, mother,
what has become of your old-fashioned hospitality? I want Daphne to
come and stay with you, and to run about the house with you, and help
you in your dairy and poultry-yard—and—get used to the place.’
Get used to the place! Why should Daphne get used to the place? For
what reason was a fair-haired chit in a white frock suddenly projected
upon Mrs. Turchill’s cows and poultry—cows as sacred in her mind as
if she had been a Hindoo; poultry which she only allowed the most
trusted of her dependents to attend upon? She felt a sudden sinking of
the heart, which was much worse than after-dinner tightness. Could it
be that Edgar, her cherished Edgar, was going to throw himself away
upon such a frivolous chit as this; a mere school-girl, without the
slightest pretension to deportment?
Daphne all this time sat in a low basket-chair by the open window, and
looked up at Edgar with calm friendly eyes—eyes which were at least
without guile when they looked at him.