XXXIII
A Disclosure
“Well, young ladies!” said Mrs. Sam Hurst, “I left you very quiet, but there seems to be plenty going on nowadays. What a beautiful moon there was last night! I put up my window to look at it, and all at once I found there was a party going on below. Quite a fête champêtre. I have newly come from abroad, you know, and it seemed quite congenial. I actually rubbed my eyes, and said to myself, ‘I can’t have come home. It’s Boulogne still, it isn’t Carlingford!’ ”
“There was no company,” said Ursula with dignity; “there was only our own party. A friend of Reginald’s and a friend of mine join us often in the evening, and there is papa’s pupil—if you call that a party. We are just as quiet as when you went away. We never invite strangers. We are as much by ourselves as ever.”
“With a friend of Reginald’s, and a friend of yours, and papa’s pupil!” said Mrs. Hurst, laughing; “double your own number, Ursula! and I don’t suppose Janey counts yet. Why, there is a young man too many. How dare you waste the gifts of Providence, you prodigal child? And now let me hear who they are.”
“You may say Janey doesn’t count,” cried that young woman in person. “Oh, Mrs. Hurst, what a bore they are! If that’s society, I don’t care for society. One always following Ursula about whenever she moves, so that you can’t say a word to her; and the others pulling poor Phoebe to pieces, who hates them, I am sure. Phoebe was so jolly at first. She would talk to you, or she would play for you! Why, she taught Johnnie and me a part-song to sing with her, and said he had a delightful voice; but she never has any time to look at us now,” said Janey, stopping in this breathless enumeration of wrongs. “She is always taken up with those horrible men.”
“I suppose you call Reginald a horrible man?” said Ursula, with rising colour. “If that was my opinion of my own brother, I should take care not to say it, at least.”
“Oh, Reginald isn’t the worst! There’s your Mr. Northcote, and there’s that Copperhead—Woodenhead, we call him in the nursery. Oh, how papa can put up with him, I can’t tell! he never had any patience with us. You can’t think how dull he is, Mrs. Hurst! I suppose girls don’t mind when a man goes on, whether he’s stupid or not. I never heard Mr. Northcote say much that was interesting either; but he looks clever, and that is always something.”
“So Mr. Northcote is Ursula’s one,” said Mrs. Hurst, laughing. “You are a perfect jewel, Janey, and I don’t know how I should ever find out anything that’s going on, but for you. Northcote! it is a new name in Carlingford. I wonder I have not heard of him already; or have you kept him entirely to yourself, and let nobody know that there was a new man in the place?”
There was a little pause here. The girls knew nothing about Northcote, except the one fact that he was a Dissenter; but as Mrs. Hurst was an excellent Churchwoman, much better than they were, who had, perhaps, been brought up too completely under the shadow of the Church to believe in it implicitly, they hesitated before pronouncing before her that unfortunate name.
“I don’t know whether you are aware,” Ursula said at last, with some slowness and reluctance, “that papa’s pupil is of a Dissenting family. He is related, through his mother, to our cousins, the Dorsets.” (This fact Ursula put forth with a little triumph, as refuting triumphantly any ready conclusion as to the social standing of Dissenters.) “I think Mr. Northcote came first to the house with Mr. Copperhead. He is a Dissenter too.”
“Why, Ursula,” cried Mrs. Hurst, “not the man who attacked Reginald in the Meeting? It was all in the papers. He made a frightful violent speech about the College and the sinecure, and what a disgraceful thing it was that your brother, a young man, could accept it. You don’t mean him?”
Ursula was struck dumb. She looked up at her questioner with her lips falling apart a little, with a look of mingled consternation and fear.
“Of course it can’t be,” said the gossip, who was not ill-natured. “You never read the papers, but your papa does, and so does Reginald. Oh, you may be sure it is some other Northcote, though I don’t know the name.”
“Ursula doesn’t like to tell you,” said Janey; “but he’s the Dissenting Minister, I know he is. Well! I don’t care! He is just as good as anybody else. I don’t go in for your illiberal ways of thinking, as if no one was worth talking to except in the Church. Mr. Northcote is very nice. I don’t mind what you say. Do you mean to tell me that all those curates and people who used to plague our lives out were nicer? Mr. Saunders, for instance; he is a real good Churchman, I have always heard people say—”
“Hold your tongue, Janey; you don’t know anything about it,” said Mrs. Hurst, whom this
