After Dick’s marriage, affairs at Annis went on with the steady regularity of the life they had invited and welcomed. The old church bells still chimed away the hours, but few of the dwellers in Annis paid any attention to their call. The factory bell now measured out the days and the majority lived by its orders. To a few it was good to think of Christmas being so nearly at hand; they hoped that a flavor of the old life might come with Christmas. At Annis Hall they expected a visit from Madam Temple, and it might be that Dick and Faith would remember this great home festival, and come back to join in it. Yet the family were so scattered that such a hope hardly looked for realization. Selby and Katherine were in Naples, and Dick and Faith in Paris and Aunt Josepha in her London home where she hastily went one morning to escape the impertinent clang of the factory bell. At least that was her excuse for a sudden homesickness for her London house. Annie, however, confided to the squire her belief that the rather too serious attentions of John Thomas Bradley were the predisposing grievances, rather than the factory bell. So the days slipped by and the squire and Jonathan Hartley were in full charge of the mill.
It did exceedingly well under their care, but soon after Christmas the squire began to look very weary, and Annie wished heartily that Dick would return, and so allow his father to take a little change or rest. For Annie did not know that Dick’s father had been constantly adding to Dick’s honeymoon holiday. “Take another week, Dick! We can do a bit longer without thee,” had been his regular postscript, and the young people, a little thoughtlessly, had just taken another week.
However, towards the end of January, Dick and his wife returned and took possession of their own home in the Pomfret place. The squire had made its tenure secure for three years, and Annie had spared no effort to render it beautiful and full of comfort, and it was in its large sunny parlor she had the welcome home meal spread. It was Annie that met and kissed them on the threshold, but the squire stood beaming at her side, and the evening was not long enough to hear and to tell of all that happened during the weeks in which they had been separated.
Of course they had paid a little visit to Mr. and Mistress Selby and had found them preparing to return by a loitering route to London. “But,” said Dick, “they are too happy to hurry themselves. Life is yet a delicious dream; they do not wish to awaken just yet.”
“They cannot be ‘homed’ near a factory,” said Annie with a little laugh. “Josepha found it intolerable. It made her run home very quickly.”
“I thought she liked it. She said to me that it affected her like the marching call of a trumpet, and seemed to say to her, ‘Awake, Josepha! There is a charge for thy soul to-day!’”
Hours full of happy desultory conversation passed the joyful evening of reunion, but during them Dick noted the irrepressible evidences of mental weariness in his father’s usually alert mind, and as he was bidding him good night, he said as he stood hand-clasped with him: “Father, you must be off to London in two days, and not later. Parliament opens on the twenty-ninth, and you must see the opening of the First Reformed Parliament.”
“Why-a, Dick! To be sure! I would like to be present. I would like nothing better. The noise of the mill hes got lately on my nerves. I niver knew before I hed nerves. It bothered me above a bit, when that young doctor we hev for our hands told me I was ‘intensely nervous.’ I hed niver before thought about men and women heving nerves. I told him it was the noise of the machinery and he said it was my nerves. I was almost ashamed to tell thy mother such a tale.”
And Annie laughed and answered, “Of course it was the noise, Dick, and I told thy father not to mind anything that young fellow said. The idea of Squire Annis heving what they call ‘nerves.’ I hev heard weakly, sickly women talk of their nerves, but it would be a queer thing if thy father should find any nerves about himsen. Not he! It is just the noise,” and she gave Dick’s hand a pressure that he thoroughly understood.
“Go to London, father, and see what sort of a job these new men make of a parliamentary opening.”