"But, my dear, what odd conduct on your part!"
"Was it? It seemed the only thing to do. Had I better bow to him, Aunt Julia?"
Mrs. Hancock felt slightly bewildered by so puzzling a question of etiquette as that involved by a girl conversing with a total stranger—particularly when that stranger turned out to be Mr. Beaumont—at six o'clock in the morning. Prudence prevailed.
"We will both look at the view out of the side-window," she said, and Mr. Beaumont encountered a pair of profiles.
But Mr. Beaumont and his butterfly net being left behind, Mrs. Hancock thought well to take advantage of the opportunity for a few general remarks. Already she had been kept waiting, been interrupted, and been faced with this problem arising from quite unheard-of conduct on Elizabeth's part. And as a gentian thrusts blossoms through the snow, so at the base of her cordiality of tone lay a frozen rigidity. As her custom was, when she wanted to say something of the correcting and improving nature, she laid her hand softly—then squeezed—on Elizabeth's. This was symbolical of the affectionate nature of her intention.
"I can't tell you, dear Elizabeth," she said, "how I have been looking forward to your coming here, and I am quite certain we shall have the happiest summer together. And I hope you won't find the manners and customs expected of a young lady in England very strange, though I know they are so different to what is quite right and proper in India, with all its deserts and black people. Most interesting it all must be, and I am greatly looking forward to hearing about it all, and I'm sure when you tell me I shall want to go to India myself. But here, for instance, dear Edith would never dream of taking a walk at six o'clock in the morning all alone, when there might be all kinds of people about, or talking to strangers, or thinking even of driving a motor-car. My dear, if you would reach down that tube and blow through it and then say, 'To the right, please, Denton,' he will take us a very pleasant round, and we shall get back ten minutes before lunch and have time to rest and cool. Had we started a few minutes sooner, when the car came round, we should have had time to go a long round, past a very pretty mill which I wanted to show you. As it is, we will take a shorter round."
There was all Mrs. Hancock's quiet masterfulness in these agreeable remarks, all the leaden imperturbability which formed so large a factor in the phenomenon of her getting her own way in her own manner, and of everybody else doing, in the long run, what she wished, until they were reduced to the state of abject vassalage in which her immediate circle found themselves. The effect it produced on Elizabeth, though not complete, was material.
"I'm afraid that it was my fault we didn't start punctually, Aunt Julia," she said. "But couldn't we go round by the mill all the same and be a little late for lunch?"
Mrs. Hancock laughed.
"And make other people unpunctual as well?" she said. "No, my dear; when anybody has been unpunctual—I am never unpunctual myself—my rule is to get back to punctuality as soon as possible and start fair again. We will go to the mill another day, for I hope we shall have plenty of drives together. About Mr. Beaumont, I hardly know what to do. If only, you naughty girl, you had not got up but stayed quietly in bed, as I meant you to do, it would never have happened. I think the best plan will be for me to ask him to lunch with us and then introduce you quite fresh, so that he will see that we all mean to forget about your meeting on the heath. Look, here are the golf links! Very likely we shall see Mr. Martin playing. He is our clergyman, and we are most lucky to have him. Yes, upon my word, there he is! Now he sees my car and is waving his cap! Well, that was a coincidence, meeting him, for now you will recognize him again when you see him in his surplice and hood in church to-morrow morning. Dear me, it is the first Sunday in the month, and there will be the Communion after Morning Service. Mr. Martin never calls it Matins; he says that is a Roman Catholic name. How quickly the Sundays come round!"