“Dear Mrs. Chiley,” said Lucilla, who was now, as usual, equal to the occasion, “it is so nice of you to be vexed. You know I would do anything to please you;—but, after all, there are thousands and thousands of gentlemen, and it is not so easy to find a voice that goes with mine. All my masters always said it was a quite peculiar second I wanted; and suppose Barbara is foolish, that is not to say I should forget my duties,” Miss Marjoribanks added, with a certain solemnity; “and then, you know, she has no mother to keep her right.”
“And neither have you, my poor dear,” said Mrs. Chiley, kissing her protégée. As for Lucilla, she accepted the kiss, but repressed the enthusiasm of partisanship with which her cause was being maintained.
“I have you,” she said, with artless gratitude; “and then I am different,” added Lucilla. Nothing but modesty of the most delicate description could have expressed the fact with such a fine reticence. No doubt Miss Marjoribanks was different; and she proved her superiority, if anybody could have doubted it, by the most beautiful behaviour. She took no more notice of the unprincipled flirtation thus set agoing under her very eyes, than if Mr. Cavendish and Barbara Lake had been two figures in gingerbread. So far as anybody knew, not even a flying female shaft from Lucilla’s bow, one of those dainty projectiles which the best of women cast forth by times, had ever been directed against the ungrateful young person who had made so unprincipled a use of her admittance into Grange Lane; and the faithless gallant had not even the gratification of feeling that Lucilla was “cool” to him. Whether this singular self-denial cost Miss Marjoribanks any acute sufferings, nobody could tell, but Mrs. Chiley still marked with satisfaction that Lucilla, poor dear, was able to eat her dinner, of which she had so much need to support her strength; and after she had eaten her dinner Miss Marjoribanks would go upstairs and show herself just as usual. She was in perfect voice, and neither lost her colour, nor grew thin, nor showed any of those external signs of a disappointment in love with which most people are familiar. “It might have been different, you know, if my affections had been engaged,” she said to her sole and sympathising counsellor; and Mrs. Chiley, who had had a great deal of experience in girls, became more and more of opinion that such sense was all but superhuman.
Meantime the tide of public opinion ran very high in Carlingford against Mr. Cavendish, who had been so popular a little while before. If it had been one of the Miss Browns, or a niece of the Colonel’s, or indeed anybody in Grange Lane, people might have passed over it—but one of Mr. Lake the drawing-master’s daughters! The only person indifferent was Mrs. Woodburn, who ought to have known better; but then she was thoughtless, like her brother, and liked it all the better, on the whole, that he should transfer those attentions which he had been paying to Miss Marjoribanks, and which in that quarter must have come to something, to a little harmless amusement with Barbara, who, after all, was very handsome, and had by times a little air of obdurate stupidity which captivated the mimic. As for anything coming of that, Mrs. Woodburn rejected the idea with a simplicity which was perfectly consistent with her insight into other people’s weaknesses. She could put on Barbara’s stolid defiant look, and even make her eyebrows square, and give something of an oblique gleam to her eyes, with the most perfect skill and mastery of the character, and at the same time be just as stolid as Barbara in respect to what was going on at her very hand, and to the consequences which must follow. She did not want her brother to marry Miss Marjoribanks, and yet she could not have said a word against so unexceptionable a match; and accordingly it was quite a satisfaction to her to see him turned aside in so perfectly legitimate a manner. She added to her repertory a sketch of Barbara at the moment when, yielding to Mr. Cavendish’s entreaties, she seated herself at the piano “for just one song”; and being perfectly successful in the representation, Mrs. Woodburn took no further care about the matter. To be sure, the hero was sufficiently experienced in such matters to know how to get out of it when it should be the proper time.
Thus the affair progressed which was to have far more serious consequences than these thoughtless persons dreamed of. Barbara ascended again to the heights of exultation and enchantment. Perhaps she was even a little in love; for, after all, she was young, and grateful to the man who thus distinguished her from the world. Yet, on the whole, it is to be feared that his house and his position in society, and the prospect of unlimited millinery, were more to her than Mr. Cavendish. All these details were not perhaps contemplated by himself as he devoted himself to the handsome contralto. He had not begun to dream, as Barbara had done for a long time, of the wedding breakfast and the orange blossoms, or even of furnishing a new drawing-room handsomer than Miss Marjoribanks’s, and giving parties which should be real parties and not mere Thursdays. None of these imaginations occupied Mr. Cavendish as he followed Barbara’s glowing cheeks and flashing eyes to his undoing. But then if he did not mean it she meant it; and, after all, there are occasions in which the woman’s determination is the more important of the two.
