‘Ada hasn’t the least idea who he is. She thinks him a great diplomate,’ communicated Jane in return, and her arm received an ecstatic squeeze.
It was amusing to Jane Mohun to see how much like a dinner at Rotherwood this contrived to be, with my lady’s own footman, and my lord’s valet waiting in state. She agreed mentally with her sister that the other guest was a very fine-looking man, with a picturesque head, and he did not seem at all out of place or ill-at-ease in the company in which he found himself. Lord Rotherwood, with a view, perhaps, to prolonging Adeline’s mystification, turned the conversation to Italian politics, and the present condition and the industries of the people, on all of which subjects much ready information was given in fluent, good English, with perhaps rather unnecessarily fine words. It was only towards the end of the dinner that a personal experience was mentioned about the impossibility of getting work done on great feast days, or of knowing which were the greater—and the great dislike of the peasant mind to new methods.
When it came to ‘At first, I had to superintend every blasting with gelatine,’ the initiated were amused at the expression of Adeline’s countenance, and the suppressed start of frightful conviction that quivered on her eyelids and the corners of her mouth, though kept in check by good breeding, and then smoothed out into a resolute complacency, which convinced her sister that having inadvertently exalted the individual into the category of the distinguished, she meant to abide staunchly by her first impression.
Lady Rotherwood, like most great ladies in public life, was perfectly well accustomed to have all sorts of people brought home to dinner, and would have been far less astonished than her cousins at sitting down with her grocer; but she gave the signal rather early, and on reaching the sitting-room, where Miss Elworthy was awaiting them, said—
‘We will leave them to discuss their water-works at their ease. Certainly residence abroad is an excellent education.’
‘A very superior man,’ said Adeline.
‘Those self-made men always are.’
‘In the nature of things, added Miss Mohun, ‘or they would not have mounted.’
‘It is the appendages that are distressing,’ said Lady Rotherwood, ‘and they seldom come in one’s way. Has this man left any in Italy?’
‘Oh no, none alive. He took his wife there for her health, and that was the way he came to set up his Italian quarries; but she and his child both died there long ago, and he has never come back to this place since,’ explained Ada.