“Let me lace you up, Kitty,” said she, seeing me struggling with my bodice and tags.
“I wish you would,” I replied. “This may be a pretty dress”—it was a fluffy white cloud of Brussels net and lace—“but it is a great bother to get into it.” Whereupon she laced me up, and tied back my skirt, and settled the little fichu that crossed over my breast, and a nestling little knot of fern leaves and flowers that daddy had just brought me home; and, during this performance, she told me some more about Lord Westbrook.
“The last time I saw him was about four or five years ago,” she said; “for he is very seldom at Westbrook, and we have never met him in London until to-day. There was a great party at the hall for shooting, and he was down for several weeks; but I was too young to go out then. I mostly saw him at church, and once at a Sunday-school treat, when he played cricket with the boys. He was somewhere between twenty and thirty then, and had not long come into his property. He was very peculiar in many things,” continued Eleanor. “He never used to wear gloves out of doors, nor tall hats; he used even to come to church in a tweed suit and a wideawake. I suppose it was because of living abroad and travelling so much.”
“I hate dandies,” I said, turning my head to see if my fichu set properly behind.
“His tenants and servants are fond of him, though he does stay away so much,” she went on. “He always takes care to be well posted up in all that concerns them, and he studies their interests more than his father did. Besides, Mr. Barrett, his agent, is a good, excellent man, whom he can trust; and his mother is a kind woman to the poor. I don’t think he is a sound Churchman,” she wound up, with a little sigh, “and that is a great pity. He would have such influence if he were, in his high position. Indeed, papa thinks he would hardly go to church at all if it were not to please his mother.”
“If he goes to please his mother, that is very good and dutiful of him,” I observed. I think Eleanor would have had something to say upon this comparatively low view of the matter, but my little travelling clock on the mantelpiece chimed eight, and that sent us both scuffling downstairs, for it was the dinner hour.
We found the drawing-room full of guests; all arrived except the one most anxiously looked for. I went through a few hurried introductions on the arm of my uncle, and was delivered over to Captain Damer’s charge; and then poor Mr. Goodeve, who was the soul of punctuality, and a little of a gourmand to boot (in spite of that traditional mutton chop and pint of half-and-half), took out his watch and sighed audibly. I felt disappointed in our unconventional nobleman, who showed himself wanting in good taste, according to my view of things, though my cousins apparently considered it quite correct that so great a man should keep little people waiting for him; but it was scarcely five minutes over the hour when we heard him running lightly up the stairs, and before the servant could announce his name there he was in the midst of us, apologising to his hostess with the gravest sincerity. He had had a telegram from his mother, he said, which obliged him to leave London earlier than he had intended, and had necessitated the making of some new arrangements which had delayed him. Aunt Alice deprecated any excuses, and beamed upon him like a noonday sun. The rest of the family closed up round him, so that all I saw was the back of an ordinary well-dressed man, slight, middle-sized, and sinewy, and the top of a close-cropped dark head bowing up and down. But in the course of his introductions he presented his face to me, and, to my unspeakable delight and astonishment, I recognised my acquaintance of the mail steamer, looking at me with just the same twinkle of amusement in his keen eyes as had covered me with confusion when I first saw him. He was so ready with that pleasant smile that it was quite evident he had expected to meet me; but I had no more expected to see him than to see my dear Tom himself. I gave a joyful start, and held out my hand eagerly, and he grasped it with a warm and friendly pressure that I did not hesitate to respond to.
“Kitty,” whispered Bertha, sidling up to me when he had passed on, “I ought to have told you that people don’t shake hands when they are introduced. Pray don’t forget that another time, dear.”
“Nonsense,” I responded flippantly, with a beaming face of satisfaction, as I watched my hero’s voyage round the room. But I did not tell her that I had met him before, and thereby left her to suffer agonies of mortification at the betrayal of my ignorance of the “customs of society” to a lord. When we had taken our places at table, he was sitting—not opposite to me, where he would have been hidden by a huge piece of aldermanic plate, which cropped out of the bank of flowers like a bush on a Queen Anne garden hedge, but midway between this and a well-filled china flower-pot, exactly in the position which, to all intents and purposes, was opposite; and several times I caught myself looking at him, and listening to him, instead of attending to my dinner and my attentive cavalier. His quiet, clear voice was easy to hear at a distance, and would have been very pleasant to listen to without any associations. Though he by no means interfered with any one else’s flow of eloquence, or staggered anybody with an unusually profound display of wisdom, he seemed to talk all over the table, and to keep the stream of conversation always fresh and sparkling. There were none of those “brilliant flashes of silence” to-night, which so often make the heart of a hostess sink within her, and aunt Alice’s beaming face expressed the utmost satisfaction.
I was quite content to listen to him, sending him a frank smile occasionally when he said something particularly amusing to his immediate neighbours, and I did not want him to talk to me. I don’t think he would have attempted it either, only that by-and-bye uncle Goodeve took it into his head (when recommending some specially choice old wine) to discourse at large upon the empty stomach of his childhood, and how hard he had found it to outgrow an early predilection for ginger-pop, which for many years had been to him the most rare and costly of attainable beverages. This turn in the conversation made poor aunt Alice so evidently unhappy that Lord Westbrook quickly interposed with a fresh and (as he thought) harmless topic. Catching my eye at the moment, he leaned forward, and addressed me in a gentle tone that was perfectly audible to a dozen people besides myself.