Mr. Tuke, feeling the uselessness of speech, nodded after a reserved manner.
“That girl,” said the old man, with a small experimental leer of confidence, “would serve a gentleman well for her beauty and her lovingness.”
He tapped the sleeve of the other’s riding-coat.
“I’m poor, sir, I’m poor and failin’. What a chance if I had a piece o’ goods that costly as to be worth a little annuity to me!”
He received a grunt and scowl of indignation for answer; but it was doubtful if he read their significance.
Mr. Tuke shook off the old clawing touch and rode on. He did not, however, put a short period to the evil by forbidding the ancient rascal then and there his presence. Which of us has the courage to strike at the snake of temptation on the first protrusion of his head from the ground? We want to circumvent him, with that truly human habit of temporizing that so often ends by our getting entangled in the toils.
Now he was righteously incensed; yet as he rode away under the yellowing trees, his thoughts ran warm on the ardent beauty of melancholy that characterized the face of all things about him; and gradually his mood fell from indignation to a tenderness that was almost a passion.
Miss Angela Royston received her preserver very prettily, and thanked him with an exaggerated effusiveness which was the more embarrassing inasmuch as the company, to whom the ultimate revelation of what he had done seemed to present itself as a rather tame anti-climax, had already treated his advent (but this was by way of provincial gaucherie) as if it were an intrusion.
The party was of the nature of a kettle-drum, it appeared, with supper to follow and genteel games. The young baronet was not yet in evidence, being ridden to some kennels across country and late in returning; but there were two or three squireens who obviously desired the moral support of his presence, and, lacking it, had so strenuously beaten about in the waste lands of their brains for ideas, as to have grown as apoplectic and nearly as expressionless as tomatoes. A notable member of the company was the Honourable Mrs. Tatty, whose turban was so immense as to give her the perpetual appearance of tilting up her nose to keep it from falling off; and whose observations invariably drew rein on the brink or pit-edge of profundity, where, when one expected much, they sat down abruptly and refused, as it were, to yield their further confidences to strangers.
This lady was accompanied by a quizzical little person, a cousin from London, who was of the order of those who curry favour with their present, by laughing at their late, company; and a saturnine gentleman, addressed as Captain Luvaine—who said little, and said that as if he grudged it—completed the party.