‘I have made so many new friends — acquaintances, Tiny. That is the worst snare of London life. One is perpetually drifting into new friendships.’
‘But isn’t it nice to have plenty of friends?’
‘That depends on the kind of people one picks up. One may have too much of a good thing, don’t you know, Tiny.’
‘I never had,’ answered the little one seriously.
‘Half the letters I get are idiotic; and the writers always want me to answer them with a long account of my own doings, which is absurd. Most of my friends write from fashionable watering-places, or from country houses full of people; while here there is nobody.’
‘There’s papa, and mamma, and there’s me!’ said Tiny; ‘besides the horses, dogs, and cats, and birds, and rabbits. I should call that lots of people.’
‘One can’t write about one’s father and mother, and cats and rabbits,’ answered Blanche; ‘ fashionable girls want to hear about picnics, and lawn parties, and races, and gowns, and bonnets. I am very glad to be back at dear old Loxley, but it’s rather a drowsy kind of life, dawdling about the park day after day, or driving along dusty roads to call on prosy people, or to visit stupid cottagers. I suppose the squire will be having some people next month for the partridge shooting.
‘Don’t you know?’ cried Tiny, bouncing up on to her knees, and nearly upsetting the tea-tray. ‘ We are going to have lots of company, and I am to come in to afternoon tea every day, but not to dessert, for that excites me, and keeps me awake half the night, Martin says; and I am having two new frocks made on purpose — brown velveteen and black velveteen, with Vandyke collars.’
‘Do leave off talking about your frocks, child, and say who is coming. I think I know all about it, though. Mother told me father had asked Admiral and Mrs. Beaumont, horrid old fogies.
‘I wish you wouldn’t say mother and father, Blanchie. It’s dreadfully vulgar.’
‘No, dear. The words mamma and papa are tabooed in civilized society. Do you know of any one else who’s coming, you little fetcher and carrier?’
‘I took ma her letters before I brought you yours, and I
found out all the news. Captain Colston is coming.’
‘He’s rather nice for an elderly man.’
‘Mr. and Mrs. Dalraine.’
‘The rector of Tivetshall and his wife. Goon.’
‘Reginald Fosbrook and his sister.’
‘She’s horribly provincial,’ said Blanche, looking down upon her country friend — who had never been presented, and stood little chance of such honour — from the altitude of a Marlborough House Ball and a Chiswick garden party.
‘She’s very good-natured, and she helps me to dress my dolls,’ protested Tiny.
‘Anybody else?’ asked Blanche languidly, taking her watch out of the dainty little point-lace pocket above her head. ‘Five minutes to eight, Tiny. You must run away to your practice, and I must go to my bath. So there is no one else coming?’
‘Nobody,’ answered Tiny, with a tremendous shake of her golden head. ‘ Yes, there is somebody else — but I forget his name.’
‘Nonsense, child! Try to remember.’
‘It was something beginning with Tre — . I remember that, because it made me think he must be a Cornishman. By Tre, Pol, and Pen, you may know the Cornishmen. Tremayne? Yes, that was it — Tremayne.’
Blanche blushed, and looked vexed.
‘What, is he coming?’ she exclaimed.
‘Yes. You know him, then? Mamma said he had never been here before, though his father was an old, old friend of papa’s.’
‘I met him in London.’
‘Is he nice?’ asked Tiny.
‘How do I know what a chit like you considers nice? Run away, Tiny — I must dress.’
Tiny slipped off to the schoolroom; yet, although breakfast at Loxley was a sharp nine, and Mr. Ferrier exacted the presence of his daughter at family prayer ten. minutes before the hour, Blanche lay for some minutes idly musing, with the little watch in her hand. ‘ I wish he were not coming,’ she thought; it will be So awkward. Father is so weak about old friendships. Perhaps he will tell them that I refused him — or he may repeat his offer. He is a persistent young man. Not that it will make the slightest difference to me. I like him very well as a friend — but my mind is quite made up. I shall never care for him enough to marry him: and it would be a very poor match. A man who is still waiting for his captaincy, and whose wife would have to go wherever his regiment is ordered — to India, most likely. He would do very well for poor Louie Fosbrook. I know she would like to be married, and to see something of life.’
The party invited for September seemed to Blanche, measured by her new metropolitan standard, a very humdrum provincial gathering; yet the expectation of these visitors helped her to bear the solitude of a small family circle with tolerable patience. She had been back at Loxley long enough to exhaust her raptures at once more beholding the dear old oaks and elms, the river, the flower-garden, the adjacent woods, her own snug rooms, furnished after her own idea of elegance and comfort, crowded with objects of art and virtu bought with her own money. These things, which had delighted her for the first week, now began to pall; and she looked forward to the arrival of the September guests with more eagerness than she would have confessed to her fashionable girl friends, who had taught her by their own shining example that the proper tone for a young woman of nineteen to take above all things between heaven and earth was a languid, slangy, nineteenth century adaptation of the Horatian nil admirari.
Loxley was looking its loveliest in the clear September light. It was a long, low, stone house, white and villa-like; a ball-room with Gothic windows and Gothic battlements at one end; a verandahed drawing-room at the other; hall, dining, and billiard rooms in the centre; all the rooms communicating. A delightful house for a ball or a party, as every one protested when he or she, generally she, first saw it. Above were spacious balconied bedrooms, airy dressing-rooms, Blanche’s den, half study, half oratory, wholly fantastical and aesthetic, and Mrs. Ferrier’s sensible, businesslike morning-room, full of useful books and work-baskets, and Berlin wool frames, and with — horror of horrors — a sewing machine in one corner. It was as elegant as a sewing machine could be made, but it set Blanche’s teeth on edge every time she saw it. The park was lovely; it lay in a fertile valley, just on the edge of pastoral Devonshire, sheltered by the wild Cornish hills on one side, by rugged Dartmoor on the other. The Tamar meandered through the grounds, and was spanned by a handsome stone bridge built by Blanche’s great-grandfather. All round there were woods, and bill-sides, and waterfalls, picturesque old farmhouses, rustic lanes, — a country of exceeding beauty. The village of Loxley was about a quarter of a mile from the park gates, a quiet little old-world place, which within the last few years had broken out into a railway station, a railway inn, and about a dozen pert modern villas.
Six of the eight expected guests arrived on the thirtieth of August. Admiral Beaumont, a fat pursy man, who considered himself a crack shot, and was always at war with the keepers, and his fat pursy wife, who could seldom be induced to stir out of doors, however lovely the weather might be, and who therefore hung as a dead weight upon the neck of her hostess throughout her visit. Mr. and Mrs. Dalraine — the first an old-fashioned sporting parson, who in coming to shoot Air. Ferrier’s partridges was racked with torture at not being with the staghounds on Exmoor; the second a lively little woman, always eager to thrust a linger into everybody’s pie, very active, very loquacious, and greedy of amusement indoors and out. Fifthly and sixthly came Reginald Fosbrook, a priggish young man, intended for the Church, bat not yet ordained; and Louie, his sister, a thoroughly rustic young woman, whose every idea was distinctly local, yet who panted for a plunge in the ocean of London life. These were all old acquaintances of Blanche’s, and their presence gave no air of novelty to the house; she knew their ways and manners as well as if they had been her own flesh and blood. Yet it was l
ively to sit down to dinner the number of the Muses instead of the number of the Graces. Mr. Ferrier was apt to be low-spirited in the seclusion of the domestic circle, and to declare that he and the country he lived m were both going to ruin in consequence of the extravagance of society at large, and his wife and daughter in particular; while with ten or a dozen visitors eating him out of house and home he was always the most cheery and open-hearted of men.
Captain Colston and Mr. Tremayne were to arrive late in the evening of the 31st.
‘I call it rather uncomplimentary to us, their not coming till the last moment,’ said Blanche; ‘ it is saying so plainly that it is the partridges and not us they come to see.’
‘From what my London correspondents told me of Mr. Tremayne, I fancy there is no doubt he would rather see one young lady in this house than all the partridges in Devonshire,’ said Mrs. Dalraine.
‘I’m afraid your London correspondents are horrible gossips.’
‘Nice fellow, Colston,’ said the admiral; ‘ very much in request; tells capital stories.’
‘They would be more amusing if every one did not know them by heart,’ suggested Blanche.
‘I hate anecdotes,’ said the rector, who was an inveterate punster. ‘They interrupt conversation.’
Miss Ferrier devoted herself to her dearest friend, Louie Fosbrook, all that evening and all the next day. She had so much to tell, and Louie was — or affected to be — delighted to listen. She talked of the Prince of Wales as if she had seen him daily, and met him at parties three times a week; operas, theatres, pianoforte recitals, the Orleans Club, the Ranelagh, Hurlingham, Sandown Park, the Row, Chiswick, Strawberry Hill, — alas! fair Strawberry’s mistress was then living and creating an atmosphere of sweetness and light in rural Twickenham, and one of the most brilliant events of the season was the Strawberry Hill garden party — her rides, her partners, her gowns, the fancy fair where she and two other girls — christened the three Graces on the spur of the moment by a long-haired Oxford poet of original and daring wit — had a stall for stephanotis and maiden-hair ferns — nothing else, only the white waxen blossoms and the fairy-like fronds.
‘It was quite the greatest success of the whole day,’ said Blanche. ‘We wore white silk gowns with green velvet sleeves and sashes, and green velvet Rubens hats with ostrich feathers. Somebody — a particular friend of Mr. Whistler’s — called us a triplet in white and green. You ought to have a season in town, Louie.’
‘Impossible, dear! Father is always complaining that he can hardly afford us bread and cheese at Okehampton, and how could he ever find me the money for such gowns as you talk of? When mother was a girl she dressed upon fifty pounds a year, and was supposed to have a liberal allowance.’
‘Poor thing,’ sighed Blanche; ‘ quite too dreadful to think of, isn’t it P You see, while there are half a dozen society papers that always notice one’s gowns it is not possible to be shabby. One of the papers was quite impertinent to a friend of mine because she went to two balls in the same frock; said that if she couldn’t afford to dress decently it would better become her to stay at home.’
‘Had you carte blanche? Did your father let you buy what you liked?’ asked Louie, envious, yet not exactly ill-natured.
‘I had to get an order from the matron, as the boys do at schools. I had to get round mother, don’t you know; but I dread the bills coming in, for I know there’ll be a domestic tempest when the squire sees Mrs. Black’s prices.’
‘And you had ever so many offers, of course?’
‘Not one that I cared to accept. Sir William Pauncefort was desperately in earnest, he quite persecuted me, in fact, and mother was rather in his favour; but he is not young, and the squire found out that his estate was what he calls dipped; and there was — but that affair is really not worth speaking about.’
Of course Louie was on the qui vive immediately, and insisted upon being told everything.
‘There was young Tremayne. He is to be here this evening, and you can judge for yourself what he is like.’
I can’t possibly wait till this evening,’ exclaimed Louie. ‘ I was sure, from what Mrs. Dalraine said, that there was something. How mean of you not to tell me sooner! This Mr. Tremayne was in love with you?’
‘Desperately. He followed us about everywhere. He belongs to a good family, don’t you know, and I believe he has a very decent income, and he is quite in society. He was able to get cards for all our parties, and he haunted me like my shadow. People naturally talked. I believed he nipped several offers in the bud by his manifest attachment. People fancied I must care for him; and that if we were not openly engaged there was some secret compact between us. It was very horrid.’
‘You should have asked your father to talk to him.’
‘I don’t think that would have been a bit of good. His father and my father were bosom friends, and nothing would so much please the squire as for me to marry Claude Tremayne, although he is not even a captain.’
‘Do tell me what he is like. Handsome, of course?’
‘Comme ci, comme ça.’
‘Fair?’
‘Black as Erebus.’
‘Delightful. I adore dark men. So striking, so distinguished. Tall, I suppose?’
‘Oh, yes, he is tall. Persecution of that kind would have been unendurable from a short man. I daresay you will think him handsome, Louie; and it has occurred to me that it would be such a nice thing if you and he were to fall in love with each other.’
‘How can that be when he’s over head and heels in love with you?’
‘He’ll soon get over a one-sided feeling of that kind. You wouldn’t mind going to India, would you?’
‘Mind! I’d go anywhere to get out of Okehampton. If any one proposed to take me to the Gold Coast I’d jump at the offer. Anything for a change. When a girl has vegetated in one poky country town till she is well out of her teens, and has never seen what the outside world is like, you may imagine how she yearns for a glimpse of it.’
‘ Out of her teens!’ thought Blanche; ‘ why, poor Louie must be twenty-seven at the least.’
‘Claude Tremayne would suit you admirably,’ she replied aloud. ‘He is an energetic young man, sure to get on in life, and the squire says he has a very nice income of his own to begin with.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Louie. ‘ You know perfectly well that you’re talking nonsense. A girl never means anything when she offers a cast-off lover to a friend. Though you don’t want to marry him, you’d rather he should break his heart for you than be happy with anybody else. If I want a husband I must get Mrs. Dalraine to manage the business for me; but it isn’t in my nature to lay traps for a man, even when he is such a perfect being as this Mr. Tremayne. I mean to enjoy my visit to dear Loxley without an arrière pensée.’ In spite of which protest Miss Fosbrook thought of nothing and nobody but Claude Tremayne all the rest of the day and evening.
Captain Colston and Mr. Tremayne came by the last train, and at a provokingly late hour — so late that, instead of making themselves decent after their journey and presenting themselves in. the drawing-room, where the ladies were dying of dulness, they went straight to the smoking-room with the dust of travel upon them, and made themselves happy with the men, rioting upon broiled bones, bitter beer, and brandy and soda, and making the great hall resound with their boisterous hilarity. One of the squire’s worst habits was his fancy for parting the sheep from the goats, and leaving his womenkind to languish in the drawing-room while his male guests enjoyed themselves and amused him in the smoking or billiard room.
Louie looked like a martyr as she took her candle and went slowly and yawningly up the wide staircase; and even Blanche, though she did not care a straw for Claude Tremayne, felt that she would have liked to hear the last news of the fashionable world from Captain Colston.
CHAPTER II. DOWN BY THE WATER-MILL.
ALL the shooting men breakfasted at a ridiculously early hour next morning — the two girls were w
ide awake and would have liked to join the revels, but that sort of thing has a bold look — and were off and away over the hills and stubble before the accustomed bell rang for morning prayers. Mrs. Ferrier officiated at family worship, not a man save the butler and footman being left in the house.
‘And I think I never heard mother read worse, which is saying a great deal,’ whispered Blanche to Louie as they sat down side by side to the well-furnished breakfast-table.
Antoinette, as the mother’s spoiled darling, was allowed to appear at the nine o’clock meal occasionally — that is to say, more often than not; although she was supposed to breakfast at seven in the schoolroom, with the meekest little country curate’s daughter, in the shape of a governess — a young woman who governed nobody, and was sent to fetch everybody’s pocket-handkerchief, yet who, being well fed and housed, and not unkindly treated at Loxley, found her lines cast in pleasant places after the barren drudgery and carking care of home.
‘Have you finished your practice, Tiny?’ asked Mrs. Ferrier, as the tall fourteen-year-old slip of humanity pushed in a chair between Blanche and Louie.
‘Yes, ma.’
‘And did Miss Ball say you might have half an hour’s recreation?’
‘She said half an hour, and I said an hour.’
‘Well, you may have a little breakfast with us, if you don’t chatter.’
‘No, ma,’ answered Tiny meekly, and then began in a breathless gabble to impart the morning news to her sister and Miss Fosbrook.
‘I was down at the gentleman’s breakfast,’ she said. ‘Pa always lets me pour out his tea when he goes out shooting. Isn’t Mr. Tremayne nice? He was so polite when I sugared his coffee for him, and he said I poured the milk in quite the Parisian way. All the others were gobbling so fast that they couldn’t have said a word without choking themselves, but he only just eat a bit of a roll, and talked to me almost as if I were grown up. He asked all sorts of questions about you, Blanche, what your home amusements were, and if you were in good spirits; if you were fond of the country; if you rode most or drove most or walked most; if you visited among the poor, and no end of rubbish. He must be painfully fond of you, Blanche.’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1129
