'Dear me, is it so late?' said my mother with a sigh. 'I have some calls to make yet. Don't you think, John, you could take them off my hands? It's only to drop a card at Lady Blair's; and you could ask if Caroline 's better—though, poor thing, she can't be, of course; Dr. Y—— says her malady is exactly my own. And then if you are passing Long's, tell Sir Charles that our whist-party is put off—perhaps Grammont has told him already. You may mention to Saunders that I shall not want the horses till I return; and say I detest greys, they are so like city people's equipages; and wait an instant'—here her ladyship took a small ivory memorandum tablet from the table, and began reading from it a list of commissions, some of them most ludicrously absurd. In the midst of the catalogue my father entered hastily with his watch in his hand.
'You'll be dreadfully late on the road, Charlotte; and you forget Y—— must be back here early to-morrow.'
'So I had forgotten it,' said she with some animation; 'but we're quite ready now. Clémence has done everything, I think. Come, John, give me your arm, my dear: Julia always takes this side. Are you certain it won't rain, Sir George?'
'I really cannot be positive,' said my father, smiling.
'I'm sure there's thunder in the air,' rejoined my mother; 'my nerves would never bear a storm.'
Some dreadful catastrophe in the West Indies, where an earthquake had swallowed up a whole population, occurred to her memory at the instant, and the possibility of something similar occurring between Seven Oaks and Tunbridge seemed to engross her entire attention. By this time we reached the hall, where the servants, drawn up in double file, stood in respectful silence. My mother's eyes were, however, directed upon a figure which occupied the place next the door, and whose costume certainly was strangely at variance with the accurate liveries about him. An old white greatcoat with some twenty capes reaching nearly to the ground (for the garment had been originally destined for a much larger person), a glazed hat fastened down with a handkerchief passed over it and tied under the chin, and a black-thorn stick with a little bundle at the end of it were his most remarkable equipments.
'What is it? What can it be doing there?' said my mother, in a Siddons tone of voice.
'What is it? Corny Delany, no less,' croaked out the little man in the crankiest tone of his harsh voice. 'It's what remains of me, at laste!'