CHAPTER XII.
There was to be a school feast at Dulham. This is a modern innovation, which may be productive of a certain amount of happiness, and is, at all events, well intended on the part of those who furnish the tea and the buns, and the steamer and the vans; but there is always something suspicious, to my mind, in the little shrill hurrahs, which are kept up by the youthful tea drinkers, at intervals during the whole day, to say nothing of their being rather unmusical. It may not be so, but sometimes it appears as if the five or six charitable gentlemen in black coats, and the equally charitable ladies in black gowns, who conduct the festivity, order the cheers, as well as the cheer; and that the hurrahs are des houras de commande. However, this is being hypercritical. The Dulham children were not to be paraded to a tea execution in procession. Mr. Greydon had asked for the use of the Pleasance lawn and garden, which was willingly accorded by its inhabitants, who delighted in the sights and sounds of childish merriment. They had no anti-hurrah feelings, Aunt Sarah came out strong on these occasions; she told little stories to the children, which made them laugh; she brought ~ a provision of toys and sweetmeats, which were hidden in the most ingenious places, in thick shrubs, in wheel barrows full of leaves, in Charlie's cot, and one great prize was discovered in Aunt Sarah's netting case. Mrs. Hopkinson, who felt she would not be out of place on this occasion, was invaluable; she had known most of the children from the day of their birth, and had an individual knowledge of their ailments and their tempers, and their frocks and bonnets, and their little brothers and sisters, that made them familiar with her, and she could not walk across the lawn without half a dozen clinging to her skirts. Some of the young ladies of the parish came in the capacity of school-teachers, and Mr. Greydon, who brought several of his assistants, was absolutely frisky; running races, and flying kites, and cutting bread and butter in slices of astounding thickness—Janet thought that no loaf had ever before been so well divided.
Even Mlle. Justine was condescending; she thought this "fête du village très-interessante," and withdrew her hands from her eternal apron pockets, to assist in tea making; and Baxter deigned to carry one of the benches that had been sent up from the school half across the lawn. While the sports were at their height, they were suddenly suspended by the appearance of the Lord Mayor's barge coming majestically up the River, flags flying, band playing, &c., &c. Either from the attraction of the crowd of children at Pleasance, or from the natural impulse to stick in the mud, which is the general characteristic of boats, it came to, just opposite the house. The children assembled on the bank, and greeted it with spontaneous cheers, and Rose and Janet following to prevent them falling into the river in a mass, were met by the sight of Willis moving majestically and sadly through the mazes of a quadrille. They were speechless with astonishment. If the monument had suddenly made them a low bow, or if the great bell at St. Paul's had made a flippant remark in good English, it would not have seemed more unnatural than Willis dancing with a handsome looking girl, dressed in the smallest of bonnets and the yellowest of gowns.
"Grey gloves too, and no crape on his hat," said Rose, "he must be very near a proposal."
They fetched their mother to see this preternatural sight; and when Willis came to a triumphant termination of the grand rond, and was making a stiff bow to Miss Monteneros, he found himself confronted by his mother and sisters-in-law, and felt that the power of his gloom, the charm of his misery had passed away for ever, he could not subside from that last chassé, stiffly as it was performed, into the bowed-down mourner.
Surprise had been felt on shore, but there was equal surprise on board. The Baroness who was doing the patroness, full of majesty, and also doing Cleopatra, minus the Nile, suddenly roused herself from a very effective attitude, and beckoning to Willis, said, in an agitated voice, "Who is that leaning on Mrs. Hopkinson's arm?"
"Lady Sarah Mortimer, ma'am."
"And the gentleman offering chairs to your sisters-in-law—two gentlemen indeed?"
"One is Colonel Hilton, who is to marry Miss Grenville, and the other is, I think, her brother."
"Well, upon my word, they are free and easy young ladies, talking and laughing with those young men as though they had known them all their lives. This school feast has been a great introduction for them," said the Baroness spitefully. "I believe, in these days, a little attention to the poor is not a bad speculation." The Sampsons were always speculating.
"The Miss Hopkinsons are a great deal at Pleasance," Willis said stiffly, "Lady Chester is constantly inviting them."
"Dear me! I wish I had known that sooner," said the Baroness, "I had no idea that they were at all in our set, or I would have phrased a little note I sent to them this morning differently."
She had actually written in a fit of superb impertinence, to say that she had a déjeuner dansant on the 16th, and that if Mrs. and the Miss Hopkinsons liked to see it, they would have a good view of the company from some of the upper windows.
"Do, my dear Willis, explain to them that I had no idea that they would like to join in my little fête, but that I shall be happy to see them as guests. It will be very gratifying if Lady Chester and I, between us, bring these girls into society; so mention that I will receive them as guests; in fact, I will send them a regular card." She seemed to think that after that, life had no further distinction to hope for.
"You can do as you like," said Willis stiffly; the Sampsons were sinking hourly in his estimation; "but I know they cannot come on the 16th. They are going to a morning concert at the Duchess of St. Maur's."
"At St. Maur House? a subscription concert of course; I am sorry now I fixed my fête for the 16th. I should have been happy to have taken tickets, and I shall feel quite distressed if my réunion should interfere with the Duchess's charitable intentions. It was very thoughtless of me to take her day. I am sure it is very kind of her to lend St. Maur House; I can't think how it is that she and I have never visited, but we have not. I should have liked this opportunity of taking your sisters, Willis, if I had been going."
Willis was becoming frightfully clear-sighted to, what Mrs. Hopkinson called, the Sampson pretences, and received as much pleasure as it was in his nature to feel, in baffling them.
"Lady Sarah Mortimer takes them; and it is not a subscription concert, only one of the Duchess's morning fêtes; begins at three, I think the card said."
A card! a private party! Lady Sarah for a chaperone! the Baroness was absolutely silenced by astonishment and vexation at her mistaken treatment of the Hopkinsons. Rachel looked amused, and viewing through her glass the groups on the lawn, observed that their picnic seemed to be going off successfully. This roused Baroness Sampson to a sense of her patroness duties. Various young men were dispatched with peremptory messages to the red-coated bargemen, and finally the boat was induced to move slowly on, the band of course playing "Partant pour la Syrie," a point of the globe the Lord Mayor's barge was most incompetent to reach.
"Now, Aunt," said Blanche, who had withdrawn with Lady Sarah to her own quiet room, "don't you think I am behaving very well, and that I am improving in habits of self-command? You have not seen any signs of fretting, and yet I am very unhappy. Arthur did not write kindly, did he?"
"He wrote under a misapprehension, caused by his father's letter; and twenty-four hours later when he would have received the news of Aileen's engagement, he would certainly be much more unhappy than you are, my love, that he had been unjust to you. But I will own that you have borne this injustice wonderfully, and that my Blanche has improved in the art of self-control. And I have been thinking, my child, that you may soon see good come out evil. Arthur will be so afraid of your fretting, and so ashamed of his pettishness, that I should not be at all surprised if he set off instantly to come home."
"Oh, Aunt Sarah! do you really think so? but then that wicked Mr. Armistead—who is clearly a very unprincipled man, and does not care about his wife—will never let Arthur off from that journey to Prague, now that he has made him promise to go. He will think it great fun to part Arthur and me, because he and his wife cannot agree."
"I have known the Armisteads for some years," said Aunt Sarah quietly. "Some people think him rather too evangelical, but that is no business of ours; he does a great deal of good in a quiet way, and he makes his giddy little wife, who has no harm in her, very happy. She told me the other day, with tears in her eyes, that she never knew what goodness was till she married Mr. Armistead. You know what her own home was. And so as I was saying," pursued the old lady without raising her eyes from her netting, "I expect that in a very short time we shall have Arthur here—perhaps to-morrow."
"Oh, Aunt Sarah!" said Blanche, throwing her arms round her Aunt's neck, "you know more than you tell me; you have heard from Arthur, you are sure he is coming; perhaps he is here," and she started up as if to go and meet him.
"My dear, dear child," said Lady Sarah taking her by the arm, "will you be a little more reasonable, and above all, will you sit down quietly on the sofa, I have not heard from Arthur; but just before I came here, Mrs. Armistead came pirouetting into my room, and said she was furious with Lord Chester, who had made poor dear Armistead give up his Prague journey, and that they were probably coming home together directly. That little goose pretended to be in despair, that her plan of going alone to Brighton was at an end; but as she danced, and laughed, and sang scraps of French songs, and was overflowing with spirits, I imagine that she is not sorry to have her grave husband at home again. I did not mean to tell you this, thinking you would rather learn it from Arthur's letter to-morrow, but now you know all that I know. Of course Mrs, Armistead had forgotten to look at the date of her letter."
"Oh! never mind dates. Now I am happy. They will be here soon—soon is a charming word, and as for Arthur's letter, I suppose I ought to be flattered by his jealousy, but I mean to be very dignified at first, Aunt."
"Very well, my dear; we shall see."
"I really must, upon principle. It would never do to let Arthur get into a habit of mistrust, and to think of his saying he was going to Prague, when he never meant it!"
"That journey may pair off with yours to Berlin, dear. But listen now to that song. How well those girls manage their voices."
The school children were all at tea, too much occupied with buns and muffins to make any noise, and Mr. Greydon who seemed exhilarated by the day's work, suggested to Janet that it would be a good opportunity to give him the pleasure the Duchess had promised him of hearing her sing. If he had proposed to her to ride a steeple-chase, she would have attempted it, so she and Rose performed an echo song, the one sister concealing herself, and repeating from a distance, the clear notes of the other—the effect was perfect. Even Colonel Hilton and Aileen, who had retreated from the school-child world, to a solitude in which they might uninterruptedly talk to each other of each other, abandoned their seclusion, and drew to the window in which Blanche's sofa was placed.
The long evening shadows were beginning to chequer the bright lawn, the still river, "one burnished sheet of living gold" reflected with unbroken clearness, the picturesque barges that floated lazily by, and the bright pleasure boats that stayed their rapid oars, at the sound of the music from the garden. The summer air, rich with the perfume of the magnolias, breathed softly over all this beauty. It was a scene that might have made a philanthropist of Timon. Even the bargemen refrained, for the time, from the stream of oaths which seem to be their idea of common conservation, and if they swore at all, swore blandly and benevolently. Aunt Sarah actually suspended her netting, and as the last notes of the song died away, Blanche drew a long breath and said, "That is too beautiful, I only wish Arthur could hear it."
"He has heard it," said a joyous voice at the door, and Blanche turning hastily round, saw her wishes realized. There was a rush and a scream, and a soothing sound of endearments, with "darlings" and "dearests" intermixed; and as Aunt Sarah precipitately fled, abandoning even her netting in the retreat, she was harassed by no fears that Arthur's sins would be visited with any undue amount of dignified coldness.