Again the girls on the hearthrug burst into inextinguishable laughter.
“What a snob you are, Sophy!” cried the outspoken Hetty. “You say all that as if you had learnt it by heart; and as for coming down, you came down to the labourer’s cottage when you were eleven years old. You ought to be used to it now you are twenty.”
Twenty. Sophy, the second, was twenty—and there was only a year between her and Vansittart’s incomparable she, who had migrated to Sussex when she was twelve. One and twenty, in the fair majority of her girlish charms. He thought it the most delightful period in woman’s life—fair as in her teens, but wiser: mature for love and wisdom.
All earthly blisses must end. The blissfullest five o’clock tea cannot last forever; but Vansittart was determined to make this endure as long as he could. The meal was finished. Even those long, lean hands of the youngsters had ceased to be stretched harpy-like towards the table for more bread and jam, or another slice of cake, which an elder sister dispensed with somewhat offensive comments upon the ravenous maw of youth.
“Oh, come now,” cried the offended Peggy. “Suppose I do eat a lot; I haven’t stopped growing yet. You have, yet I’ve heard you say you could sit and eat one of Nancy’s plum-loaves all the evening. But that was when there was no one here but ourselves.”
Sophy blushed furiously, and Vansittart came laughingly to the rescue.
“I can vouch for the seductiveness of Nancy’s plum-loaf,” he said. “I think I must coax her to impart the recipe to my mother’s cook. Is your Nancy a coaxable person?”
“Not very. She adores us, but she is rather gruff and grim to the outside world. She was in father’s service as kitchen-maid when she was fourteen, at the time of his marriage, ages before I was born,” said Eve.
Ages. Yet she was the eldest. What did that word ages mean? Three years, perhaps, in a young lady’s vocabulary.
“And she followed your fortunes from the old house, and she is as faithful as Caleb Balderstone, I dare say,” said Vansittart, and felt in the next moment that it was precisely one of those things he had better have left unsaid.
“She is just like Caleb,” replied Eve, frankly accepting the suggestion, “just as faithful and true. I feel sure that if it were suddenly put upon us to give a dinner, and there were a saddle of mutton or a forequarter of lamb hanging conveniently before a neighbour’s fire, Nancy would elope with it just as audaciously as Caleb made off with the cooper’s spit—all for the credit of the family. She works like a slave for us from morning till night. She is a splendid manager, and she makes teacakes as only a Yorkshirewoman can.”
“And in cooking she could give points to many of your professed cooks,” said Jenny. “Father is a difficult man in the matter of dinner.”
“And dinner is a difficult matter for poor people,” laughed Eve, to the annoyance of Sophy, who had not yet taken to heart the foolishness of the ostrich family, and who was always anxious to slur over an impecuniousness which was visible to the naked eye. It was only Eve who had learnt to grasp the nettle. Perhaps it was her country life, among green fields and blackthorn hedgerows, and chestnut copses, and the barren heather-clad hills, which had kept her free from the age’s worst fever, the sickly longing for wealth. Had she been reared in Pimlico or Brompton, she too might have been spoilt, her nature warped, her mind tainted with the sordid thirst for gold, the desire for finery and fine living, the aching envy of rich men’s daughters. The people she knew and mixed with were county people, who wore their old gowns, and lived simple, old-fashioned lives when they were in the country, and left their modern vices behind them in London ready for use next season.
Vansittart glanced at a cheap little American clock ticking among the cups and vases on the chimneypiece. A quarter past six, and his watch had told him that it was a quarter before five as he approached the Homestead.
“I don’t know how to apologize for staying so long,” he faltered, as he rose from the Colonel’s comfortable chair and extricated his hat from the reluctant paws of the grey cat.
“Don’t apologize,” said Jenny, who was the pertest of the sisters; “there is nothing so unflattering to one’s amour propre as a short visit. And then there are so many of us. A visitor must stay a longish time in order to give each of us a civil word.”
Vansittart’s conscience smote him at this remark. He feared that he had addressed his conversation exclusively to Eve. He had no consciousness of having spoken to anyone else. For him the room had held only Eve; only that one salient figure. The others were faintly sketched in the background. She was the picture.
He got out of the room somehow, after shaking hands all round, and even in his deep trance of love he was conscious that the two youngest hands were sticky with traces of strawberry jam. There being no one else to show him out—for who could disturb Nancy, remote in the kitchen, with futile ringing of a ceremonial bell?—the whole bevy of sisters accompanied him to the outer door, the youngest carrying a tall candle, which threatened to topple over and sprinkle her with a shower of ozokerit. He had time to notice the rooms through which they went—one shabbily furnished as a dining-room, with an old harpsichord for sideboard; the other evidently the Colonel’s den for books, boots, and tobacco. He had time to note the
