The landlady came bouncing out, followed by her husband at a more dignified gait, to receive the newcomers. Indifferent to their salutations, Mr. Foxwell stepped quickly from the chaise and offered his hand to his niece, who scarcely more than touched it in alighting. Caleb meanwhile ran up to assist the maid, but was forestalled by Mr. Betteridge, who performed the office with a stately gallantry quite flustering to the young woman, causing her to blush, and her legs, stiff with the constraint of the journey, to stumble. Miss Foxwell and the maid followed the landlady immediately to the entry and up the stairs; but Mr. Foxwell, as he saw Squire Thornby gazing at him in sullen defiance, stopped to greet that gentleman in the suavest possible manner.
“Ah, Mr. Thornby, you here?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the Squire, in the shortest of tones, and as if determined to show himself proof against the other’s urbanity; “attending to my own business.”
“An unusual circumstance, I suppose,” said Foxwell, pleasantly, “as you think it worth mentioning. A dull sort of day.”
“I dare say,” was Thornby’s savage reply.
Not the least altering his amiable tone or half-smiling countenance, Foxwell continued: “Smooth roads—that is to say, for these remote parts.”
“Sir,” said Thornby, fiercely, conceiving himself and his county alike disparaged, “I find these parts quite good enough for me.”
“Indeed, I envy you,” said Foxwell, with a slight plaintiveness. “I wish from my heart I could say I find them good enough for me—since I am doomed to live in them.”
That anything good enough for Thomas Thornby could not be good enough for another man was not a proposition soothing to Thomas Thornby’s soul. Having no fit retort within present grasp of his tongue, however, and knowing that even if he had one, his adversary would find a better one to cap it with, the Squire contented himself with a fiery glare and an inward curse. Then saying abruptly to his servant, “See that my dinner is served the moment it’s ready, Bartholomew,” he entered the inn and tramped up the stairs with great weight of heel.
Foxwell laughed scarce audibly, and followed with a step as light as the other’s was heavy. Emerging from the stair-head to a passage that divided the rear from the front rooms, he went into one of the latter, where he found the table set, and his niece and her maid at the window, looking down at the street. Across the way were a baker’s shop, a draper’s, a rival inn with gables and a front of timber and plaster; and so forth. A butcher’s boy with a tray of meat, a townswoman with a child by the hand, and two dogs tumbling over each other, were the moving figures in the scene—until a clatter of horses and a rumble of wheels were heard, and then the maid exclaimed:
“Lor, mistress, what a handsome coach, to be sure! And see the man servant on the horse behind. People of great fashion, I’ll warrant. And they’re coming to this very inn!”
Miss Foxwell watched listlessly till the vehicle—the private coach already mentioned as approaching the town from the North—had disappeared beneath the window from which she looked.
Foxwell had been standing at the empty fireplace, heedless of what might be seen in the street. He now spoke, carelessly:
“You saw the amiable gentleman who stood below, Georgiana, and who passed this door with so fairy-like a tread as I came up?”
“I didn’t observe him,” replied Georgiana. “Somebody passed very noisily.”
“The same. I thought you might remember him from the days before you left home. But, to be sure, you were a child then, and he, too, was younger. He is one of our neighbours, Squire Thornby.”
“I remember the name, but I don’t think I ever knew the gentleman.”
“If you never did, you lost little; and you’ll count it no great privilege when you do know him,—unless you have a tenderness for rustical boobies.”
Georgiana making no answer, the maid said to her in a lowered voice, “Lor, m’lady, your uncle had needs know you better. I saw the gentleman, and a ojus-looking man servant he had with him. I never could abide such bumpkin fellows.” The waiting-woman came from the town in which her mistress had received her education; she had been promoted to her present post from that of housemaid to Miss Foxwell’s aunt, and naturally she brought superior notions with her to the North.
Foxwell, wondering why the dinner had not arrived, went impatiently to the door. Steps were heard ascending the stairs, accompanied by the voices of women.
“The party from the private coach, being shown to a room,” whispered the maid to her mistress.
At that moment Foxwell, in the doorway, called out in pleased surprise, “Why, as I live—certainly it is! Lady Strange, upon my soul!—and Mrs. Winter! and Rashleigh!—George Rashleigh, or I’m a saint!”
He seized the hand of her whom he called Lady Strange, and kissed it with a gallant fervour; treated the other lady in like manner, and then threw his arms around the gentleman who was third and last of the newcomers (not counting two servants) in an embrace such as was the fashion at the time.
“Why, upon my honour, ’tis Bob Foxwell,” said Lady Strange.
She was a fair woman in the thirties, of the opulent style of beauty, being of good height, and having a fine head, and a soft expression wherein good nature mingled with worldly nonchalance. She was dressed as a fashionable person of the town would dress for travelling, and her presence brought to the north country inn something of the atmosphere of St. James’s. As far as attire and manner went, this was true of her companions also. The gentleman, whom Foxwell had saluted as Rashleigh, was a good-looking man of medium age and size, retaining in face and carriage the air of youth; he was the elegant town gentleman, free from Foxwell’s discontent, easy-going and affable without apparently caring much for anything in the world. The second lady, Mrs. Winter, formed a contrast to Lady Strange: she was slight, though not angular; her eyes were gray, and her complexion clear, yet the impression she left was that of a dark beauty; and she had a cold incisiveness of glance.
“And your devoted slave as ever, Lady Strange,” said Foxwell, kissing that lady’s hand again. “But in heaven’s name, what are you doing in this part of the world? Come in, that I may see you better. Come, I am dining in this room.”
They entered the chamber, regardless of the landlady’s eagerness to show them to a room for their own use. Mrs. Betteridge would thereupon have ushered their man servant and lady’s maid to the room she had chosen, but these menials refused to proceed without orders, and so remained outside Foxwell’s door, laden with small impedimenta of various sizes and uses, from pistols to scent-bottles.
“One never knows who may turn up,” said Rashleigh. “I was thinking of you only yesterday, Bob, and wondering if I should ever see you again.”
“And what ill wind for you,” asked Foxwell, “blows this good to me?—for an ill wind it must be to any civilized person that blows him to these wilds.”
“I have the honour to be escorting these ladies back to London from Lady Strange’s country-seat by the Tweed, where they have been for the recovery of their health.”
“And our good looks,—tell the truth, Cousin Rashleigh,” said Lady Strange. “My dear Foxwell, we have rusticated till we are near dead of dulness,—is it not so, Isabella?”
“Dead and buried, Diana,” said Mrs. Winter, in a matter-of-fact tone. “And to think you are still alive, Foxwell? ’Tis so long since you disappeared from the town, I swear I had forgot you.”
“Cruel Mrs. Winter!” replied Foxwell. “But ’tis not for you to speak of being dead and buried. You know not what rustication is. You have passed, I suppose, a month or so out of the world, and are now going back to it; while I have been a recluse in this county these two years, and may be so for the rest of my life. The town, as you say, has forgot me, and God knows whether I shall ever return. See what poverty brings one to, and take warning.”
The reader is doubtless aware that country-house life did not occupy in the eighteenth century the place it does to-day in the routine of the “smart” world. People of fashion had their town houses and their country-seats then, of course; but many such were wont to pursue more exclusively the one life or the other,—to be town mice who sometimes went to the country, or country mice who sometimes came up to town. Those who preferred the gaiety of the town were more prone to count that time lost which they had to pass out of it, and to look down upon those who spent most of their days in the country. When the town mice left London by choice, it was to take the waters at Bath, or to make the “grand tour” of the Continent. Week-end house-parties had not come in, there were no seaside resorts, and the rich did not hie themselves in August to the moors of Scotland. “Beyond Hyde Park all is desert,” said the fop in the play; and Robert Foxwell and his friends were so far of Sir Fopling’s mind; they valued wit, and used “fox-hunter” as a name of scorn. No wonder, then, that Foxwell declared himself miserable in his exile.
“’Tis for your sins, Bob,” said Lady Strange. “You were a monstrously wicked man in London, as I remember.”
Mrs. Betteridge now contrived to insinuate herself into the notice of Rashleigh, addressing him as “my lord,” and begging to know the wishes of himself and their ladyships upon the matter of dinner and rooms.
He turned to Lady Strange. “What say you, Cousin Di? I suppose we shall be driving on as soon as we have dined—”
“You shall dine with me,” broke in Foxwell. “I’ll not lose sight of your faces. I don’t meet a civilized being once in an age.—You will set more places, landlady: my friends will dine here.” Without waiting for their assent, he motioned the landlady out to the passage, and there gave further orders.
The attention of the three Londoners now fell upon the two figures at the window. Miss Foxwell, quite ignored by her uncle since the arrival of his friends, had remained where she was, regarding the newcomers with a side glance in which there was no great joy at their advent. Now that she saw their looks directed to her, she turned her face again toward the street, with a slight blush at the scrutiny.
“What a pretty girl it is at the window,” whispered Lady Strange to her companions.
“And what is she doing here with Foxwell?” said Mrs. Winter, eying the young lady critically.
“The dog!—he is to be envied,” said Rashleigh.
Resentfully conscious of the cool gaze upon her, Miss Foxwell whispered to her maid, “How rudely those people stare at us!”
“They must be very great quality,” replied the maid, reverentially. “Their waiting-gentleman looks the height of fashion,—but their woman isn’t no great sights.” Miss Foxwell’s maid had been quick to inspect the attendants of the travellers, and the lackey had already put himself on ogling terms with her, a proceeding which the other maid regarded superciliously.
As soon as Foxwell returned to his friends, Rashleigh called him to account in an undertone: “I say, Foxwell, if this county produces such flowers as that at the window, ’tis not so barren a wilderness.”
“That?” said Foxwell, carelessly. “Oh, that’s my niece, Miss Foxwell. Come here, Georgiana.”
She obeyed without haste, and was introduced. She was not in the mood to affect for civility’s sake a cordiality she did not feel, nor was she conciliated by the easy graciousness of Lady Strange, the sharp, momentary smile of Mrs. Winter, or the unrestrained admiration of Mr. Rashleigh.
“You are a sweet child,” said Lady Strange, speaking in a sweet tone herself, “to have such a naughty uncle.”
“I dare say my uncle is not much worse than other people,” said Georgiana, coolly, with the intention, not of defending her relation, but of being pert.
“She means you, Cousin Rashleigh,” said Lady Strange, smiling gaily. “She sees your character in your face.—But, my dear, you can’t have known much of your uncle in London. I’ll tell you some tales!”
Instead of carrying out her threat immediately, however, the lady turned her attention to her maid, bidding her put down her burdens and go and dine in the kitchen.
The man servant and Georgiana’s attendant being dismissed for a like purpose, Foxwell and Rashleigh, to give the ladies that brief privacy from masculine eyes which a toilet-marring journey makes welcome, went down-stairs and paced the yard till dinner was ready.
“So this is the place of your retreat, Bob,” said Rashleigh; “or hereabouts, I mean.”
“An old house and some beggarly acres eight miles from here. ’Tis my last ditch. Perhaps I was lucky in having that to fall back into. Fortune was set upon driving me from the field in London.”
“But you might still have contrived to live there one way or another. Men do, who have lost their all.”
“By playing the parasite?—begging of people whom I scorn?—laughing at great men’s stupid jests, or enslaving myself to great ladies’ caprices? Not I. Neither could I play the common rook where I had once lived the gentleman. Nor had I any fancy for the debtors’ prison. I might have turned highwayman, but I am too old and indolent, and the risk is too great. No; for a gentleman who had made the figure I had, and who could no more keep up that figure,—curse the cards and the tables, the mercenary women and the swindling tradesmen!—there was nothing but self-banishment to the ancestral fields.”
“’Tis a wonder you’ve kept them. I should have thought, from your habits of old, you’d have converted the last inch into the ready by this time.”
“They are beyond my power to convert. The estate is mine only in part. I share the possession with that young person you saw up-stairs.”
“The pretty niece?”
Foxwell shrugged his shoulders. “She may be pretty—I really haven’t concerned myself enough to study her looks. I shall doubtless find her an intolerable drag upon me. Notwithstanding our relationship, we are new acquaintances. She is my brother’s orphan—the only child. She was born at Foxwell Court, the place of my retirement, and she spent her childhood there. Both her parents died when she was very young; my father survived them a year, and upon his death she was sent to be reared by her mother’s elder sister. During all this time,—from before my brother’s marriage till after this girl left Foxwell Court,—I never came near the place. Most of the time, indeed, I was abroad, but even when in England I preferred the South,—and my father perhaps was not sorry for that, for, to tell the truth, I had never agreed with him and my brother, and, as the old gentleman loved his peace, he could spare my presence. After his death and the departure of the girl, Foxwell Court was shut up for a long while,—that is to say, till I sought refuge there two years ago. My father left the place to me and my niece, on such terms that it cannot be divided till she marries, nor my share sold during my lifetime.”
“You speak of it as a few beggarly acres. Had he nothing else to leave?”
“Not a farthing. Ours was a family of decayed fortune. You are wondering how in that case I contrived to make the appearance I did in town and on the Continent. By the bounty of my Uncle Richard—you remember him, of course: the attorney who made a fortune in speculation. He looked upon life much as I did, and not with the puritanical eyes of my father and brother; so he provided for me while he lived, and left me half his shares when he died,—to prove, I make no doubt, that virtue does not always pay best. When I had melted his shares into pleasure, I resorted, as you know, to the cards, and the tables in Covent Gardens, thinking they might repay in my necessity what I had lost by them in my prosperity. ’Twas a fool’s hope! For a roof to cover my head, I came home to Foxwell Court. I have at least enjoyed liberty there. But now that this niece has finished her education, and comes home in accordance with my father’s plans, responsibility begins. I was never made to play the guardian, George. The affectionate, solicitous, didactic uncle is no part for me. And especially to a minx who has been taught to look upon the frivolities of the gay world with virtuous horror. We have known each other but four days, and we hate each other already. She hadn’t been in my society an hour till I perceived righteous disapproval written upon her face.”
“Oh, I think you mistake the girl altogether. From the glimpse I had of her, brief as it was, I could swear she is no prude. There is, indeed, a delicacy and sensibility in her face, but nothing the least sanctimonious. She seems to me a young lady of spirit, a little annoyed about something. No doubt you expected to find such a girl as you describe, and you behaved accordingly: she was quick to take offence, and now you mistake her natural resentment for self-righteous rebuke.”
“I know not what my expectations had to do with the matter, but I can see plainly enough her dislike. And, damme, George, can you imagine what a restraint upon my conduct the presence of a young unmarried female will be?”
“Then you have only to get her married off your hands as soon as may be,” said Rashleigh.
“Her marriage means the division of our estate, and my share then will not suffice to feed a horse upon. But I won’t balk at that, for the sake of freedom, if you’ll find me a man willing to take her with the little she’ll have.”
“I grant, gentlemen of any fashion want a good settlement with their wives, in this age. But consider her beauty:—that is an item on account of which I, for one, would vastly abate my demands—if I were fool enough to marry at all.”
“She wouldn’t have you, fool or no fool. I can see she will be as fastidious when it comes to mating as if she had ten thousand a year. I fear this region will not furnish a man to her liking—I can commend her good taste in that. So heaven knows when I may be rid of her! But enough of the chit: I’m saddled with her, and there’s an end. You must do something for me, George,—you and Lady Strange and her friend.”
“Speaking for myself, I’m entirely at your service.”
“You must make me a visit at Foxwell Court,—now. Yes, you must. Your time is your own, I am sure. It matters not whether you arrive in town this month or the next. While I have you, I will hold you. When we have dined, you will drive on with me, not to London, but to Foxwell Court. You’ll give me a week—nay, a fortnight, at least—of civilized company, for humanity’s sake.”
“Why,” said Rashleigh, “’tis rather a change of plan—though I see nothing against it, for my part. If the ladies are willing—”
“They must be willing,” cried Foxwell. “You must persuade them:—if naught else will do, you must be taken ill and be unable to go on to London. Egad, I’ll poison you all with the bad wine they keep here, ere I let you escape me!”
“Nay, let me try persuasion first. I can commend you to them as a host—I know of old that you’ll stop at nothing that has promise of amusement in it.”
“I’ll stop at nothing to amuse them as my guests—you may warrant that. As for my house, you will not find it entirely uninhabitable. Some of the company I have kept there of late, though it would amuse you well enough, would scarce be acceptable to my Lady Strange; but fortunately, in view of my niece’s home-coming, I have issued strict decrees of banishment,—so we shall find no rustic rake-hells, drinking parsons, or roaring trollops on the premises. ’Tis in such company I have found solace in my exile—and I’ll do them the justice to say, they are better lovers of wit and real mirth than the booby fox-chasing, dog-mongering, horse-talking, punch-guzzling gentry and their simpering, formal womankind.”
“You are beginning to practise self-denial, Bob,—driving your boon companions away,” said Rashleigh, smiling.
“As a gentleman I could not do otherwise, of course. Since Miss must needs come, they must go. I must learn to seek my amusements, such as they are, out of the house. But I sha’n’t think of that, or of anything to come, while you and these ladies are with me. You see I have set my heart on having you.”
They continued in this strain, walking to and fro between the street end of the passage and the rear of the inn yard, in which different vehicles were standing idle, until Caleb appeared with the announcement that dinner for the whole party was ready. Ascending, they found the ladies on terms of cool politeness as between Georgiana and the other two. During the course of the meal, it could be seen that Mrs. Winter had incurred the greater part of that disfavour which the girl evidently disdained to conceal. Good cause for this could be found, not only in the steeliness of nature suggested by the London lady’s voice and look, but by the great freedom of topic and remark she allowed herself. Time and again was a hot blush called to Georgiana’s cheek, and she was fain to fix her eyes upon her plate in indignation at the disregard of her modesty. That was an age when many young ladies were accustomed to liberties of speech from their elders in their presence—liberties nowadays incredible. How they contrived to ignore them while they were necessarily conscious of them, as it is certain they did, calls for admiration. Nothing that we know of that most delightful of young women, Sophia Western, makes us esteem and love her more than the way in which she endured the coarse talk of her father, never receiving from it the slightest taint herself, never seeming to notice the outrageous portions of it. But it was from men only, or chiefly, that tender ears were used to hearing conversation so free. Had she been subjected to it by one of her own sex, even Sophia Western would have made the protest of a blush. Not that Mrs. Winter’s anecdotes and observations were of the crude plainness of Squire Western’s language. The lady’s tongue was a rapier, not a bludgeon, and there would have been little if anything to reprove in the use she made of it on the present occasion, had Georgiana been absent or ten years older. As it was, besides the offence to her modesty itself, Georgiana felt that she was being treated with intentional lack of consideration. She thought the lady guilty of spite as well as license: she noted, too, and placed to her account against him, the lack of any protest on her uncle’s part on behalf of her innocence. He laughed and was merry, in his easy, fine-gentlemanly way; and the young lady, in her sense of careless outrage, could scarce restrain the tears of injury, loneliness, and revolt.
It was not till the dinner was nearly over, and a comfortable disinclination to resume their travels had been created in his friends, that Foxwell put his invitation before the ladies. At first they declared such a visit impossible, but as they could mention no respect wherein the impossibility lay, and as Foxwell knew how to mingle flattery with appeals to their compassion, they soon yielded.
Poor Georgiana! It may be imagined how far she shared the joy of her uncle at the prospect of playing hostess to these people, though, as he had called upon her openly to second his invitation, she had perfunctorily done so. This matter settled, the rest of the company became merrier, and Georgiana more miserable, than ever.
Meanwhile, though she knew it not, nor could have dreamt how deeply it would affect her life, the stage-coach had arrived and left a passenger; and the two horsemen from the North, guided by the postboy, were even now riding into the passage beneath the room in which she sat.