I sat in the great window of the breakfast-room, looking over half the county. If I had been a woman of elevated mind or enlightened views, I should have been thinking of all the human wishes and disappointments that lay beneath my eyes, each one under its own roof and its own retirement. But, on the contrary, I observed nothing but a small figure on a small pony ascending the road from the village. In the same way I ought to have been benevolently glad that our excellent young Rector had inclined his eyes and heart towards my own favorite and friend—the friend and favorite now of so many years—and that a home so suitable, at once to her origin and her tastes, awaited the acceptance of Alice. But I was not glad—I sent my thoughts ever so far away to Bertie’s bungalow, and felt aggrieved and disappointed for the boy who, alas! was a boy no longer, and most likely, instead of feeling aggrieved on his own account, would have nothing but his warmest congratulations to send when he heard of his old playmate’s marriage. Things are very perverse and unmanageable in this world. The right people will not draw together, let one wish it ever so strongly, whereas the wrong people are always approaching each other in eccentric circles, eluding every obstacle which one can place in their way. I could not be very melancholy on the subject, because the pony and its little rider came every moment nearer, and brightened the face of the earth to my eyes—but still it was in the highest degree provoking. If it ever came to anything! There was still that escape from this perplexing matter; for whether I felt disposed to support his suit or not, it was still by no means certain, even when Mr. Reredos had finally declared himself, what Alice Harley might say.
CHAPTER III
“Who are we to have, Clare?—let us hear. You don’t suppose that my mind, weighed down with the responsibilities of law-making, can remember everything, eh?—even my wife’s guests?” said Derwent, rubbing his hands, as we sat after dinner near the fire in the warm crimson dining-room. When we were alone I gave Mr. Crofton’s claret my benign countenance till he was ready to go with me to the drawing-room. There were not enough of us to separate at that genial hour, especially as little Derwent sat between us peeling his orange, and quite ready to give his opinion on any knotty point that might occur.
“Papa, please give Willie Sedgwick the little grey pony,” said Derwie, “to ride when he’s here; he says his papa will never let him take his horse anywhere with him—there’s such a lot of children,” added my boy, parenthetically, with some pity and contempt. “I like little Clary best—I like her because her name’s the same as mamma’s, and because she has blue eyes, and because she likes me, and she’s good to that poor old nurse, too, who has her daughter in a fever, and daren’t go to see her.”
“How do you know about the nurse’s daughter’s fever, Derwie?” asked I.
“Mamma, they sent me to the nursery, when you were calling there,” said Derwie, with some emphasis, “and she told me she has the scarlet fever, and Mrs. Sedgwick won’t let her mamma go to see her, for fear of the children taking it—isn’t it a shame? Clary told me she said her prayers for her every night, to get her well; and so,” said Derwent, coloring, and looking up with some apparent idea that this was not perfectly right, and the most manful intention to stand out the consequences, “and so do I.”
His father and I looked at each other, and neither of us said anything just for that moment, which silence emboldened Derwie to believe that no harm was coming of his confession, and to go on with his story.
“And Mr. Sedgwick’s man—he’s such a funny fellow. I wish you’d ask him to tell you one of his stories, mamma,” said Derwie, “for I know he’s coming here with them. He has a brother like Johnny Harley—just as lame—and he got cured in Wales, at St. Winifred’s Well. Why don’t you ask Mrs. Harley to send Johnny to St. Winifred’s Well, mamma?—she only laughed at me when I said so. I say, mamma,” continued Derwie, with his mouth full of his orange, “I’ll tell Russell he’s to tell you one of his stories—I never knew a fellow that could tell such famous stories—I wish you had a man like Russell, papa. He’s been all over the world, and he’s got two children at home, and the name of one of them is John—John Russell—like the little gentleman in Punch.”
“Don’t be personal, Derwie,” said Mr. Crofton, laughing; “we are to have Mr. Sedgwick’s Russell, and Mrs. Sedgwick’s nurse—who else?”
“The Harleys,” said I, “for we’ll postpone for a little, if you please, Derwie, your friends below-stairs; and Mr. Reredos and his sister, and Miss Polly Greenfield, and her little nieces. I fear the womankind will rather predominate in our Easter party—though Maurice Harley, to be sure”–
“Yes—Maurice Harley, to be sure,” said Derwent, still with a smile, “is—what should you call him now, Clare—a host in himself?”
“Fellow of Exeter College, Cambridge,” said I, demurely; “he has it on his card.”
“Mamma, is Maurice Harley a clergyman?—shouldn’t a clergyman care about people?” said little Derwent; “I don’t think he does. He likes books.”
“And what do you mean by people?—and don’t you like books?” I asked.
“Oh! yes, sometimes,” said my son; “when there’s pictures in them. But you know what people mean, mamma—quite well! You talk to them, you do—but Maurice Harley puts up his shoulders like this, and looks more tired than Bob Dawkes does after his ploughing—so tired—just as if he could drop down with tiredness. Oh!” cried Derwent, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, “I would not give our Johnnie for a hundred of him.”
“A hundred of him!” I confess the thought filled me with alarm. In my heart I doubted, with a little shudder of apprehension, whether the country, not to speak of Hilfont, could have survived the invasion of a hundred such accomplished men. “But, Derwie,” said I, recovering from that shock, “if you do not like books except when they have pictures in them, how do you think you are ever to learn all the things that Maurice Harley knows?”
“Mr. Sedgwick says he’s a prig,” says little Derwent, with great seriousness, “and I know more things now than he does—I know how to make rabbits’ houses. If you were to get some little white rabbits, mamma, I could make a beautiful house for them. Will Morris taught me how. Oh! papa, don’t you know Will Morris wants to marry little Susan at the shop?—he has her picture, and it’s not the least like her, and I heard Maurice Harley say the photographs must be like, because the sun took them. Does the sun see better than other people? That one’s like you with the paper in your hand; but Will Morris’s picture, instead of being Susan, is anybody in a checked dress.”
“I begin to think you will turn out a great critic, Derwie,” said his admiring father, who desired no better than to spend his after-dinner hour listening to the wisdom of his son.
“What’s a critic? is it anything like a prig?” asked Derwent, who was trying hard to set up the crooked stem of a bunch of raisins—now, alas, denuded of every vestige of its fruit—like a tree upon his plate; the endeavor was not very successful, although when propped up on each side by little mounds of orange-peel, the mimic tree managed to hold a very slippery and precarious footing, and for a few minutes kept itself upright. We two sat looking at this process in a hush of pleased and interested observation. Maurice Harley, with all his powers and pretensions, could neither have done nor said anything which could thus have absorbed us, and I doubt whether we would have looked at the highest triumphs of art or genius with admiration as complete as that with which we regarded little Derwie setting up the stalk of the bunch of raisins between these little mounds of orange-peel.
“Clare, how old is he now?” said Mr. Crofton to me.
As if he did not know! but I answered with calm pride, “Seven on Monday, Derwent—and you remember it was Easter Monday too that year—and tall for his age, certainly—but he is not so stout as Willie Sedgwick.”
“Ah, Monday’s your birthday, is it, old fellow?” said Derwent;