“Do you hear that? Ding—dong, ding—dong. It is eleven o’clock and nearly half my only Wonderful Day has passed already! I shall run away now and do all that I have promised—telephones, cakes, linen, Witherby, everything! But every moment of the time I shall be saying in my heart: ‘It is an outrage that another gray, bald, whiskered, middle-aged, prosy old man is coming to Roseborough! It is an outrage!’ ... Why couldn’t he be young?”
Before Mrs. Lee could gather herself into composure after a sudden violent hug and as sudden and violent a release, her mercurial friend was dashing through the gateway into the grounds of Villa Rose.
Mrs. Lee sat down and gave herself up to reflection.
“‘A gray—bald—whiskered—outrage!’ Is that what she said? Dear, dear. What can have given her the notion that Jack...?” She murmured. “To be sure I did say that some of our boys are past middle life now, but I’m sure I didn’t say that Jack....” [She broke off her musing to pat her sooty kitten smartly. “No, no! naughty kitty! You are not to scratch the table legs!”] “Such a rebel cry for youth! Nay, it was more; it was an unashamed cry for a young man! Yet we all thought hers such a wonderful marriage for a farm girl. But perhaps it wasn’t, after all. Do those who live by the soil need the cling of the earth in all vital things? Why there! what a mate she might have made for my Jack if....”
Her perplexed expression changed suddenly into a glow and a smile as if her questioning thoughts had accidentally discovered something so unexpected that she hardly knew what to make of it.
“If? Why, there is no ‘if’! She is quite free! It may be difficult for Roseborough to believe that its Hibbert Mearely has really passed away from it to a better place—for, of course, it seems almost disloyal to suggest that even heaven is a better place than Roseborough—but the truth remains that Hibbert Mearely has gone.” After contemplating this calamitous but none-the-less statistical fact, she added, “And it would almost seem as if that April-hearted child he married realizes it and is”—she cast about for a word and presently decided upon—“resigned.”
CHAPTER VII
Ding-dong.