Then came in old Mrs. Hearn, whose cottage was not distant two minutes’ walk from the Small House. She always called Mrs. Dale “my dear,” and petted the girls as though they had been children. When told of Lily’s marriage, she had thrown up her hands with surprise, for she had still left in some corner of her drawers remnants of sugarplums which she had bought for Lily. “A London man is he? Well, well. I wish he lived in the country. Eight hundred a year, my dear?” she had said to Mrs. Dale. “That sounds nice down here, because we are all so poor. But I suppose eight hundred a year isn’t very much up in London?”
“The squire’s coming, I suppose, isn’t he?” said Mrs. Hearn, as she seated herself on the sofa close to Mrs. Dale.
“Yes, he’ll be here by-and-by; unless he changes his mind, you know. He doesn’t stand on ceremony with me.”
“He change his mind! When did you ever know Christopher Dale change his mind?”
“He is pretty constant, Mrs. Hearn.”
“If he promised to give a man a penny, he’d give it. But if he promised to take away a pound, he’d take it, though it cost him years to get it. He’s going to turn me out of my cottage, he says.”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Hearn!”
“Jolliffe came and told me”—Jolliffe, I should explain, was the bailiff—“that if I didn’t like it as it was, I might leave it, and that the squire could get double the rent for it. Now all I asked was that he should do a little painting in the kitchen; and the wood is all as black as his hat.”
“I thought it was understood you were to paint inside.”
“How can I do it, my dear, with a hundred and forty pounds for everything? I must live, you know! And he that has workmen about him every day of the year! And was that a message to send to me, who have lived in the parish for fifty years? Here he is.” And Mrs. Hearn majestically raised herself from her seat as the squire entered the room.
With him entered Mr. and Mrs. Boyce, from the parsonage, with Dick Boyce, the ungrown gentleman, and two girl Boyces, who were fourteen and fifteen years of age. Mrs. Dale, with the amount of good-nature usual on such occasions, asked reproachfully why Jane, and Charles, and Florence, and Bessy, did not come—Boyce being a man who had his quiver full of them—and Mrs. Boyce, giving the usual answer, declared that she already felt that they had come as an avalanche.
“But where are the—the—the young men?” asked Lily, assuming a look of mock astonishment.
“They’ll be across in two or three hours’ time,” said the squire. “They both dressed for dinner, and, as I thought, made themselves very smart; but for such a grand occasion as this they thought a second dressing necessary. How do you do, Mrs. Hearn? I hope you are quite well. No rheumatism left, eh?” This the squire said very loud into Mrs. Hearn’s ear. Mrs. Hearn was perhaps a little hard of hearing; but it was very little, and she hated to be thought deaf. She did not, moreover, like to be thought rheumatic. This the squire knew, and therefore his mode of address was not good-natured.
“You needn’t make me jump so, Mr. Dale. I’m pretty well now, thank ye. I did have a twinge in the spring—that cottage is so badly built for draughts! ‘I wonder you can live in it,’ my sister said to me the last time she was over. I suppose I should be better off over with her at Hamersham, only one doesn’t like to move, you know, after living fifty years in one parish.”
“You mustn’t think of going away from us,” Mrs. Boyce said, speaking by no means loud, but slowly and plainly, hoping thereby to flatter the old woman. But the old woman understood it all. “She’s a sly creature, is Mrs. Boyce,” Mrs. Hearn said to Mrs. Dale, before the evening was out. There are some old people whom it is very hard to flatter, and with whom it is, nevertheless, almost impossible to live unless you do flatter them.
At last the two heroes came in across the lawn at the drawing-room window; and Lily, as they entered, dropped a low curtsey before them, gently swelling down upon the ground with her light muslin dress, till she looked like some wondrous flower that had bloomed upon the carpet, and putting her two hands, with the backs of her fingers pressed together, on the buckle of her girdle, she said, “We are waiting upon your honours’ kind grace, and feel how much we owe to you for favouring our poor abode.” And then she gently rose up again, smiling, oh, so sweetly, on the man she loved, and the puffings and swellings went out of her muslin.
I think there is nothing in the world so pretty as the conscious little tricks of love played off by a girl towards the man she loves, when she has made up her mind boldly that all the world may know that she has given herself away to him.
I am not sure that Crosbie liked it all as much as he should have done. The bold assurance of her love when they two were alone together he did like. What man does not like such assurances on such occasions? But perhaps he would have been better pleased had Lily shown more reticence—been more secret, as it were, as to her feelings, when others were around them. It was not that he accused her in his thoughts of any want of delicacy. He read her character too well;—was,
