Part 7

‘Well,’ said Mrs. Plowden, ‘they were really more nice to Emmy, though she is only my daughter, than they were to your sister Emily, James. I did not think that Emily was received as her rank demands. They were more civil to me, a simple clergyman’s wife, than they were to her. Now, though one is always pleased, of course to be put in the first place, I don’t think it was right. Oh! not Mr. Swinford, he was very attentive; but in such cases the man does not count, and the old lady----’

‘Is she really an old lady, mamma?’ said Florry, who had not yet found the opening for her anxious questions which she desired.

‘Well--her son is not quite young. He is not like Jim; he is a full-grown young man of the world. As for Mrs. Swinford, she is so curled and frizzed and powdered and everything done to her, that you can’t tell how old she is. But it is always safe to say the old lady when there is a son quite old enough to marry. Of course she will be the old lady as soon as he gets a wife.’

‘I am sure, mamma, it would not make you an old lady if Jim were to marry,’ said Emmy, always exemplary in her sentiments.

‘Jim!’ Mrs. Plowden said, with a sort of shriek. And then she added: ‘Poor Jim’s not a landed proprietor like Mr. Swinford. He can never make me a Dowager, poor boy! And what chance has he of ever marrying? none that I know of, without any money, and not even a profession. Alas! there is a great difference between Leo Swinford and Jim.’

‘Is Leo his name? What an odd name!’

‘But pretty, don’t you think--and so uncommon?’ said Emmy.

Emmy had a slightly dazzled look about the eyes, as one that has seen visions. She had been into that fairy palace, and come into absolute contact with Prince Charming. Florry knew that the details of the interview were not likely to come out until they two came face to face in their room, with no father or mother in the way.

‘By the way,’ said the Rector, as if it had not been the prominent thing in his mind all the time, ‘did Jim come back with you from the river, Flo?’

‘He thought he would like a little stroll before he came back--for half an hour. He promised me faithfully he would come back in half an hour.’

‘It is more than half an hour now,’ said the Rector, with his watch in his hand; and then he sighed and went away.

‘Oh, children,’ said Mrs. Plowden, when his steps had died out in the distance of the rambling house, ‘how often must I tell you not to be so pointed with your half-hours? How can a young man tell, if he strolls out in the evening, exactly to a moment when he’s to get back? He may meet a friend, or some little accident may happen, and he is kept, without any doing of his. And there is your father with his watch in his hand as if he had never been a young man himself. I don’t want you, I am sure, to be anything but truthful--but if you could throw a little veil over such things! Now, however soon he may come, and however right he may be, your father will never forget having looked at his watch. He will say you can never trust in his word because of that half-hour.’

‘I only said what he told me, mamma,’ said Florence, half offended.

‘As if there was any use in saying what he told you!’ cried Mrs. Plowden, ‘when you know that’s Jim’s weakness never to be sure when he is coming in; and to say in half an hour is just as easy as in---- Jim! why, here he is, as exact as clockwork. Run and tell your father, Florry: he can put his watch in his pocket. Oh, I am so glad! It is always a little triumph for us womenfolk who believe whatever you say, you troublesome Jim!’

‘Do you believe whatever I say, mother?’

‘Oh, more than I ought--more than I ought. And oh, Jim, if you only knew the pleasure of it, the pride of it! To see you walking in at your time as a gentleman should--and like a gentleman in every way!’

The words were, perhaps, capable of various interpretations; but the little party in the Rectory drawing-room knew precisely what they meant; and Jim knew very well that his mother, in the darkness of the room, where no lights as yet were lighted, was crying quietly to herself over his virtue and punctuality. It struck him with a sort of mingled shame and ridicule to think that, perhaps, had she known where he had been, she would not have been so much content. I may say that it was much more like an hour and a half than half an hour since he had left the two girls at the landing-place; so that he was not precisely a model of exactness after all.

When Jim came in all the other subjects in the world went out; and as he had no interest in the Hall and its inhabitants there was no further gossip about the Swinfords in the Rectory family that night, until, indeed, the evening was over, and the girls found themselves face to face in the room which they shared, which was a long and low one, under the eaves, with a number of small windows, and space enough to make up for a slanting roof on one side. It was indeed quite a large room, with two little beds, two little white-draped toilet tables, two sets of drawers, everything double, as the two were who had lived in it all their lives. All their little confidences had been made to each other there, all that had happened had been discussed; their whole life, which was not eventful, had passed in this dim chamber, where the light came in through greenish lattices, and under the shadow of the waving trees. They came upstairs, following each other very demurely, each with her candle, but when they were safe in their shelter, and had shut their door, each put down her candle on her own table, and they rushed together, seizing each other’s hands. ‘Oh, Emmy, tell me!’ cried the one who had been left at home.

‘There is nothing to tell, indeed,’ said Emmy, ‘except what you have heard already.’

‘I have heard nothing about _him_,’ said her sister.

‘Oh, Flo, dear! all that nonsense was amusing enough as long as he was only a dream. He has been a dream for so long; but now he’s a man, just like another.’

‘Not like any other in the world, Em.’

‘That is, to you and me; but, thank heaven, nobody knows except us two, and it is all over. He is like any other man, rather more nicely dressed, rather more careful of his clothes.’

‘Oh, Emmy!’

‘That doesn’t sound like our hero, does it? I suppose it is because he is half French: red stockings and patent-leather shoes, as Mab said.’

‘Well,’ said Florry, ‘if true hearts are more than coronets, they are certainly more than patent-leather shoes.’

‘That is very true, but somehow it goes dreadfully against one’s ideal. And, Flo, he is not--tall.’

Florence burst into a somewhat agitated laugh. ‘What does that matter?’ she said.

‘Oh, nothing at all. I know that little men are just as nice, sometimes nicer, than big ones; but you know what we always thought: and he is not the least like it--not one little bit.’

Emmy looked as if she were going to cry; for the fact was that Mr. Swinford had been, by a piece of girlish romance not very uncommon among such unsophisticated girls as those of the Rectory, the hero of an entirely visionary castle in the air on the part of this young lady. Florence was more wise; she had the ideas of her century, and was very strongly convinced that for her sister to marry well was a thing most essential at the present crisis of the family fortunes; but she had been very indulgent to Emmy’s romance, possibly from the conviction that this was the only way in which her sister could be moved to take such a step--and partly because she had herself a sentimental side, and was deeply convinced that no true marriage could be made without love.

‘Well,’ she said soothingly, ‘never mind; he may be everything that is delightful in himself, even though he is short and not handsome.’

‘I never said he was not handsome,’ said Emmy, with some indignation, ‘nor yet short. How exaggerated you are! I said he was not tall. He is very nice-looking. Not the way we used to think; not dark-haired and with deep dark eyes as we used to imagine--and not fair either, which is perhaps better: but yet very nice--in his own way.’

‘Brown!’ cried Florence, ‘sober, sensible, common brown--like most people. After all, that must be the best and safest since Providence makes the most of us of that hue.’

‘If you think he is common,’ said Emmy indignantly, ‘you are making the greatest mistake. He is not heroic--in appearance: but unusual--to a degree.’ Emmy’s powers of language were not great, but her feeling was unmistakable. ‘I never saw any one at all like him,’ she said. ‘If he is not like a man in a poem or on the stage, he is just as little like the ordinary man you meet. Fancy, it was he who made the tea! His mother said he always did it. The way she calls Leo at every moment is the most curious thing. She has a sweet voice, but it is so imperious, as if she never thought it possible that any one could resist her; and, though it is quite low, he hears her before she has half called him, whatever he may be doing.’

‘All that is very interesting,’ said Florence, ‘but’--she seized her sister’s hands and looked anxiously into her face--‘of course you can’t see how things are to go the first time--but, Emmy, oh, tell me----!’

Emmy shook her head; she withdrew her hands; her eyes drooped before her sister’s gaze. ‘How can you ask?’ she said, ‘how could anybody tell? He was very nice, of course--as he would have been to the housemaid if we had sent her, or to Mrs. Brown at the school.’

‘Mamma said he was exceedingly nice to you, and not so nice to Aunt Emily.’

‘Ah, that was Mrs. Swinford she was thinking of. Mamma naturally thinks of her. No, no, Flo, we must not deceive ourselves; it was all the other way. If there is any one here whom Mr. Swinford thinks it worth his while to talk to and make friends with, it will neither be you nor me.’

‘Me, no! I never thought of such a thing. But why not you, Emmy? and, if not you, who else?’

Emmy clasped her hands together and shook her head. She had been shaking it for at least a minute before she let the words ‘Aunt Emily’ drop from her lips, with an accent of something like despair.

‘Aunt Emily!’ said Florence in the profoundest surprise: her tone changed in a moment into one of disdain. ‘Aunt Emily! why, she is old enough to be--she is almost as old as mamma. She has nothing to do with it at all.’

‘Do you remember,’ said Emmy, with some solemnity, ‘_that_ French novel which we found in Uncle Thurston’s room?’

Florence nodded her head. It had been a fearful joy to find in their uncle’s room anything so wildly wicked, so universally condemned, as a yellow French novel. It had not been so delightful in the attempt to read it--for the girls were far too innocent to understand the stimulating fare there placed before them. But it was a terrible and alarming memory in their lives.

‘Well, the heroine in that was a widow,’ cried Emmy. ‘She was the one everybody thought of. And Mr. Swinford is quite French, and Aunt Emily doesn’t look old, and she is really handsome. Don’t you know when people want to be very complimentary to me they say I am like Aunt Emily?--only when they want to be very complimentary.’

‘So you are; and the more he thinks of her the more he ought to turn to you, who are so like her.’

‘Oh! do you think so? I, for my part, feel sure that he will like her best. She will be able to talk to him. She has been in Paris, where he comes from. She will be like the people he has been used to.’

‘Oh! not like the people in Uncle Thurston’s novel!’

‘I did not mean that; but she can talk, and she is what people call elegant, and you’ll see he’ll think more of her than either of you or me.’

‘It is impossible,’ cried Florence, with the confidence of youth. ‘A woman with a grown-up daughter!’

‘Wait,’ said Emmy oracularly, ‘and you will see.’

IX

It was a day or two after these events before any new incident happened; and, indeed, the appearance of Mr. Swinford in the village of Watcham was not a very remarkable incident. For Watcham was not in the depths of the country, where the sight of a new face was in itself extraordinary. People from London were continually appearing in this little place. To be sure, it was too early in March for the shoals of men in flannels who were to be seen lounging about in summer; but still there were people who would come down ‘to have a look at the river’ even in the winter season, when the boats were laid up. And boating men, and indeed others, had a way of appearing at the ‘Blue Boar’ on visits from Saturday till Monday, and were very correct in their town costumes when they arrived, though afterwards falling into many eccentricities of apparel. Mr. Swinford might have been one of them, as he walked down on Saturday afternoon. He was not very fond of walking, having had a French rather than an English education. It had already been discovered that his usual way of going about was in an exceedingly smart dog-cart, which he drove in a way rather unusual to the aborigines, with a rein in each hand. I need not pause to point out that Leo Swinford, an Englishman educated in France, was not at all an Anglomane, but probably more French than most young Frenchmen whose desire would have been to look English--at least in everything that had to do with riding or driving. But on this occasion he walked, and might have been taken simply for one of the Saturday to Monday men. But no; Watcham was too clever for that. None of them were so point devise as the young master of the Hall. Though it is always a little muddy on this riverside road, he still had the _chaussure_, so much admired yet scorned by the young ladies who had discussed it--the red silk stockings and glistening patent-leather shoes which had filled Mab with wonder and disdain. He had a warm greatcoat buttoned over a white silk _cache-nez_ which was round his throat. The cut of the coat, though excellent, was not like Bond Street--or is it Savile Row? I am of opinion that it had been made there, but it had acquired from the wearer a something, a little more shape than is common to a young Englishman, a _je ne sais quoi_ of foreign and stranger. His hat, I suppose, was also an English hat, but somehow curled at the brim, as an Englishman’s hat rarely does. The village got note of his arrival in some extraordinary way before he was within its bounds. People peeped over the little muslin blinds in the cottages; a woman or two bolder than the rest came out to the door to have a good look at him. Even the men in the bakers’ and butchers’ carts stopped and winked at each other; ‘awful Frenchy,’ they thought he was.

After a while it became apparent that this exquisite figure was bound for the Rectory; and some thrill running through the very path brought the news before he did to the Plowdens, who came together as by some electric current driving the different atoms towards each other. I have no doubt this is an impossible metaphor, and that electric currents have nothing to do with atoms; but the reader who knows better will, I hope, derive a little gratification from his smile at my ignorance. Anyhow, the ladies of the house flew as by an instinctive movement into the drawing-room. Mrs. Plowden was the first to get there; and the girls found her shaking up the sofa cushions, and drawing the chairs about--not to range them against the wall and make everything tidy as her grandmother would have done, but to give them that air of comfortable disorder which is the right thing nowadays. Emmy followed her mother’s example with a little, flutter and agitation, shaking up anew the sofa cushions which Mrs. Plowden had just arranged to the best advantage, while Florence gathered up a leaf or two which had fallen from the flower vases, and picked off a faded flower or two from the pots of narcissus and jonquils which were in the room. It might have been the Queen who was coming, though it was only a natty young man. Then the Rector appeared, a little anxious, rubbing his hands. ‘What had I better do?’ he said; ‘shall I be here with you to receive him, or wait in my study? He may be coming only to call on me.’

This view of the subject filled the ladies with consternation, though they allowed there was a certain truth in it.

‘You had better be in the study, anyhow, James,’ Mrs. Plowden said; ‘and if he asks for me, of course I will send for you; if he is shown in to you instead, of course you will say, after you have had your conversation, “You must come into the drawing-room, Mr. Swinford; my wife and daughters will be rejoiced to see you;” or words to that effect.’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose I shall be at a loss for words,’ said the Rector, who had no respect for his wife’s style. He gave a glance round the room; not with any satisfaction, for he felt that it was rather dingy, and that a stranger would not be likely to see what he felt, being so accustomed to it, to be the real comfort of the room. It was looking its best, however. The sunshine was bright in the windows, the jonquils and narcissus filling it with the fragrance of spring--a little too much, perhaps; but then one window was open, so that it was not overpowering. The green of the lawn showed through that open window, just on a level with the carpet; but it was so bright outside that there was no chilling suggestion in this. And the girls looked animated, with more colour than usual, in their fervour of anticipation. The Rector gave a little note of semi-satisfaction, semi-dissatisfaction peculiar to men and fathers, and which is not in the least expressed by the conventional Humph! but I don’t know what better synonym to give than this time-honoured one; and then he turned away and shut himself into his study to await there the advent of the great man. There was no reason why he should be deeply moved by the coming of Leo Swinford. It would be well that the Rectory and the Hall should maintain amicable relations, but that was all. Mr. Plowden was not likely to be any the better whatever happened, except perhaps through the parish charities. There was no better living or dignity of any kind to which this young man’s influence was likely to help him. Jim? Was there perhaps a possibility that Leo, if he pleased, might do something for Jim? or at least bring him into better society, make him turn to better things, even if he did nothing more? There was surely that possibility. One young man can do more for another, if he likes to try, than any one else could do--if Jim would but allow himself to be influenced. And surely he would in this case. He would be flattered if Mr. Swinford sought him, if he was invited and made welcome at the Hall. These thoughts were not very clearly formed, as I set them down, in Mr. Plowden’s head; but they flitted through his mind, as many an anxious parent will know how. And this was what made his middle-aged bosom stir as he sat and waited for Leo Swinford. Then a smile just crept about his month as he remembered what his wife had been saying about, perhaps, one of the girls. But the Rector shook his head. No, no, that was not to be thought of. They were good girls--invaluable girls. But she might as well think of a prince for them as of Leo Swinford, who was a sort of prince in his way. No, not that; but perhaps Jim----

The question between the drawing-room and the study was now put to rest, for Mr. Swinford, when he had walked up briskly to the door, admired by the ladies from between the bars of the venetian blinds in the end window, asked for Mrs. Plowden, and was triumphantly ushered into the room by the parlourmaid, who secretly shared the excitement, wondering within herself _which_ of the young ladies? And he was received and shaken hands with, and set in a comfortable chair; and a polite conversation began, before Mrs. Plowden, looking as if the matter had just occurred to her, in the midst of her inquiries for Mrs. Swinford, broke off, and said, ‘Florry, my dear, your papa will be in the study; go and tell him that Mr. Swinford is here.’

‘Can I go?’ said the young man; ‘it is a shame to disturb Miss Florry on my account; tell me which door, and I will beard the Rector in his den.’

‘No, no! run, Flo; my husband will be so glad to see you here. I daresay you remember him in old times, though we were not here when you were a child. It was his father then who was Rector, and Lady William--I mean my sister-in-law Emily--was the young lady at home, as it might be one of my girls now.’

‘I recollect it all very well,’ said Leo, with a look and a smile which did not betray his sense that the girls now were not by any means what the Emily Plowden he remembered had been. He even paused, and said with a tone which naturally came into his voice when he spoke to a young woman--‘I see now how like your daughter is to the Miss Plowden who used to play with me, and put up with me when I was a disagreeable little boy.’

‘I am sure you never were a disagreeable little boy,’ said Mrs. Plowden. ‘I have often heard Emily speak of you. She was very fond of you as a child.’

‘I hope she will not give up that good habit now I am a man. I hope, indeed, I am a little more bearable than I was then. I was a spoiled brat, I am afraid. Now, I am more aware of my deficiencies. Ah, Rector, how do you do? I am so glad to meet another old friend.’

‘How do you do, Leo?’ said the Rector. The girls admired and wondered, to hear that their father did not hesitate to call this fine gentleman by his Christian name. ‘It is a very long time since we met, and I don’t know that I should have recognised you: a boy of twelve, and a man of----’

‘Thirty,’ said Leo, with a laugh, ‘don’t spare me--though it is a little hard in presence of these young ladies. But it has not made any such change in you, sir, and I should have known you anywhere.’

‘Twenty years is a long time. What do you say, Jane? Eighteen years: well, there’s no great difference. And so you have come home at last, and I hope now you are at home you mean to stay, and take up the duties of an English country gentleman, my dear fellow--which is your real vocation, you know, as your father’s son.’

‘And what are those duties, my dear Rector,’ said Leo, with a laugh; ‘perhaps my ideas are rather muddled by my French habits--to keep up a pack of fox-hounds, and ride wildly across country: and provide a beef roasted whole for Christmas?’

‘Well, you can never go wrong about the beef at Christmas--but I think we’ll let you off the fox-hounds. If you’ll subscribe to the hunt, that will be enough.’

‘That is a comfort,’ said the unaccustomed squire, ‘for I am not, I fear, a Nimrod at all.’

To hear the familiar way in which their father talked, laying down the law, but not in the least in his imperative way, filled the girls, and even Mrs. Plowden, with an admiration for the Rector which was not invariable in his own house. He was at once so bold and so genial, so entirely at his ease with this gentleman, who was so much out of their way, and beyond their usual range, that they were at once astonished and proud--proud of their father, who spoke to Leo as if he were no better than any other young man in the place, and astonished that he should be able to do so. But Mrs. Plowden could not longer allow these two to have it all their own way.

‘It is so nice of Mrs. Swinford to give up her favourite place, and to consent to come home, in order that you may live among your own people--for it must be a sacrifice. We can’t say anything in favour of our English climate, I fear. We all get on very well, but then we are used to it--but Mrs. Swinford----’

‘Oh, your mother is with you, of course,’ the Rector said in no such conciliatory tone.