“Of course I do. They are five miles off;—at Clatton farm, Carry. I don’t think you have been near Clatton yet. We will ride there tomorrow.” And thus Nora Rowley was made at home at Monkhams.
She was made at home, and after a week or two she was very happy. She soon perceived that her host was a perfect gentleman, and as such, a man to be much loved. She had probably never questioned the fact, whether Mr. Glascock was a gentleman or not, and now she did not analyse it. It probably never occurred to her, even at the present time, to say to herself that he was certainly that thing, so impossible of definition, and so capable of recognition; but she knew that she had to do with one whose presence was always pleasant to her, whose words and acts towards her extorted her approbation, whose thoughts seemed to her to be always good and manly. Of course she had not loved him, because she had previously known Hugh Stanbury. There could be no comparison between the two men. There was a brightness about Hugh which Lord Peterborough could not rival. Otherwise—except for this reason—it seemed to her to be impossible that any young woman should fail to love Lord Peterborough when asked to do so.
About the middle of September there came a very happy time for her, when Hugh was asked down to shoot partridges—in the doing of which, however, all his brightness did not bring him near in excellence to his host. Lord Peterborough had been shooting partridges all his life, and shot them with a precision which excited Hugh’s envy. To own the truth, Stanbury did not shoot well, and was treated rather with scorn by the gamekeeper; but in other respects he spent three or four of the happiest days of his life. He had his work to do, and after the second day over the stubbles, declared that the exigencies of the D.R. were too severe to enable him to go out with his gun again; but those rambles about the park with Nora, for which, among the exigencies of the D.R., he did find opportunity, were never to be forgotten.
“Of course I remember that it might have been mine,” she said, sitting with him under an old, hollow, withered sloping stump of an oak, which still, however, had sufficient of a head growing from one edge of the trunk to give them the shade they wanted; “and if you wish me to own to regrets—I will.”
“It would kill me, I think, if you did; and yet I cannot get it out of my head that if it had not been for me your rank and position in life might have been so—so suitable to you.”
“No, Hugh; there you’re wrong. I have thought about it a good deal, too; and I know very well that the cold beefsteak in the cupboard is the thing for me. Caroline will do very well here. She looks like a peeress, and bears her honours grandly; but they will never harden her. I, too, could have been magnificent with fine feathers. Most birds are equal to so much as that. I fancy that I could have looked the part of the fine English lady, and could have patronised clergymen’s wives in the country, could have held my own among my peers in London, and could have kept Mrs. Crutch in order; but it would have hardened me, and I should have learned to think that to be a lady of fashion was everything.”
“I do not believe a bit of it.”
“It is better as it is, Hugh;—for me at least. I had always a sort of conviction that it would be better, though I had a longing to play the other part. Then you came, and you have saved me. Nevertheless, it is very nice, Hugh, to have the oaks to sit under.” Stanbury declared that it was very nice.
But still nothing was settled about the wedding. Trevelyan’s condition was so uncertain that it was very difficult to settle anything. Though nothing was said on the subject between Stanbury and Mrs. Trevelyan, and nothing written between Nora and her sister, it could not but be remembered that should Trevelyan die, his widow would require a home with them. They were deterred from choosing a house by this reflection, and were deterred from naming a day also by the consideration that were they to do so, Trevelyan’s state might still probably prevent it. But this was arranged, that if Trevelyan lived through the winter, or even if he should not live, their marriage should not be postponed beyond the end of March. Till that time Lord Peterborough would remain at Monkhams, and it was understood that Nora’s invitation extended to that period.
“If my wife does not get tired of you, I shall not,” Lord Peterborough said to Nora. “The thing is that when you do go we shall miss you so terribly.” In September, too, there happened another event which took Stanbury to Exeter, and all needful particulars as to that event shall be narrated in the next chapter.
XCVII
Mrs. Brooke Burgess
It may be doubted whether there was a happier young woman in England than Dorothy Stanbury when that September came which was to make her the wife of Mr. Brooke Burgess, the new partner in the firm of Cropper and Burgess. Her early aspirations in life had been so low, and of late there had come upon her such a succession of soft showers of success—mingled now and then with slight threatenings of storms which had passed away—that the Close at Exeter seemed to her to have become a very Paradise. Her aunt’s temper had sometimes been to her as the threat of a storm, and there had
