“Suppose he doesn’t,” exclaimed her sister, contemptuously. “Did you ever hear of a bridegroom giving watches? Of course, the bridesmaids are supposed to have watches. Their fathers give them watches directly they are in their teens, unless they are hard-up, like our father. I shouldn’t wonder if he were to give us diamond arrow brooches.”
Hetty had seen a diamond arrow in Lady Hartley’s bonnet-strings, and had conceived a passion for that ornament.
“What do you bet that it will be diamond arrows?”
“There’s no use in betting. If you lose, one never gets paid.”
“I don’t often have any money,” Peggy replied naively; and then came a knocking at the lath and plaster partition, and Sophy’s sharp voice remonstrating—
“Are you children never going to leave off chattering? You are worse than the swallows in the morning.”
There was one blissfullest of days for Peggy during the week before the wedding, a balmy June morning on which Vansittart came in a dogcart to take Eve and her youngest sister to Haslemere station, whence the train carried them through a smiling land, perfumed with bean blossoms and those fragrant spices which pine woods exhale under the summer sun, to Liss, where another dogcart was waiting for them, and whence they drove past copse and common to Merewood, Vansittart’s very own house, to which he brought his future wife on a visit of inspection—“to see if she would like any alterations,” he said.
“As if anyone could want to alter such a lovely house,” exclaimed Peggy, who was allowed to run about and pry into every hole and corner, and open all the wardrobes and drawers, except in Mrs. Vansittart’s rooms, where everything was looked at with almost religious reverence.
There were boxes packed already in this lady’s dressing-room, the note of departure already sounded.
“My mother talks of a house at Brighton,” said Vansittart. “She has a good many friends settled there, and the winter climate suits her.”
“I am sorry she should feel constrained to go away,” said Eve, looking ruefully round the spacious morning-room, with its three French windows opening on to a wide balcony, a room which could have swallowed up half the Homestead. “It seems as if I were turning her out. And I am sure there would have been ample room for both of us in this big house.”
“So I told her, love; but English mothers don’t take kindly to the idea of a joint ménage. She will come to us often as our guest, I have no doubt, but she insists upon giving up possession to you and me.”
They loitered in all the lower rooms, drawing-room and anteroom, library, billiard-room—an unpretentious country house, spread over a good deal of ground, roomy, airy, beautifully lighted, but boasting no art collections, no treasures of old books, unpretentiously furnished after the fashion of a century ago, and with only such modern additions as comfort required. The drawing-room would have appeared shabby to eyes fresh from London drawing-rooms; but the colouring was harmonious, and the room was made beautiful by the flowers on tables, chimneypiece, and cabinets.
“I dare say you would like to refurnish this room by-and-by,” said Vansittart.
“Not for worlds. I would not change one detail that can remind you of your childhood. I remember the drawing-room in Yorkshire, and how dearly I loved the sofas and easy-chairs—the glass cabinets of old blue china. It would grieve me to go back and see strange furniture in that dear old room; and I love to think that your eyes looked at these things when they were only on a level with that table”—pointing to a low table with a great bowl of roses upon it.
“Not my eyes alone, but my father’s and grandfather’s eyes have looked from yonder low level. I am glad you don’t mind the shabby furniture. I confess to a weakness for the old sticks.”
“Shabby furniture!” repeated Eve. “One would think you were going to marry a princess. Why, this house is a palace compared with the Homestead; and yet I have contrived to be happy at the Homestead.”
“Because Heaven has given you one of its choicest gifts—a happy disposition,” said Vansittart. “It is that sunny temperament which irradiates your beauty. It is not that tip-tilted little nose, so slender in the bridge, so ethereal in its upward curve, nor yet those violet eyes, which make you so lovely. It is the happy soul forever singing to itself, like the lark up yonder in the fathomless blue.”
“I shouldn’t think you cared for me, if you didn’t talk nonsense sometimes,” answered Eve, gaily; “but it is a privilege to be happy, isn’t it? Sophy and I have had the same troubles to bear, but they have hurt her ever so much more than they hurt me. Jenny and I sometimes call her Mrs. Gummidge. I think it is because she has never left off struggling to be smart, never left off thinking that we ought to be on the same level as the county families; while Jenny and I gave up the battle at once, and confessed to each other frankly that we were poor and shabby, and the daughters of a scampish father. And so we have managed to be happy. I love to think that I am like Beatrice, and that I was born under a star that danced.”
“You were born under a star that brought me good luck.”
They were in the flower-garden, a delightful old garden of velvet turf and herbaceous borders, a garden brimful of roses, standard roses and climbing roses and dwarf roses, arches of roses that made the blue sky beyond look bluer, alleys shaded with roses, like the vine-clad berceaux of Italy. It was a garden shut in by walls of ilex and yew, and so secluded as to make an al fresco saloon for summer habitation; a saloon in
