“It was all done so quickly, it was impossible for me to stop him,” said his wife, deprecatingly. “You know you would not have minded if it had been anybody else’s carriage; and, if they are rather a wild set, we cannot reform them by holding aloof from them. And it is not as if I had let one of the girls go,” said she, hurriedly, lowering her voice.
“But you have let ‘one of the girls’ go. Miss Lane is only a few months older than Joan,” he answered, more gravely than ever.
And she, being a wise woman, dropped the conversation, to take it up again when they two should be alone together.
This little incident and the discussion it had caused disturbed the peace of all the occupants of the carriage. The vicar was annoyed that a member of his household should be thrown into such very uncongenial and perhaps dangerous society on the very day of her confirmation. His wife was uneasy on account of his annoyance. Joan and Betty were somewhat agitated, too; but they gave no vent to their feelings except in a little soft-toned wrangle about the amount of space each was authorized to take on the rather small front seat of the brougham. When the Braithwaite carriage passed them they became suddenly silent, both gazing eagerly out until it had passed out of sight. They had time to see the portly Lady Braithwaite and her handsome daughter leaning back comfortably on one seat, while Miss Lane and Harry Braithwaite sat opposite; he was talking to her, and did not notice the brougham.
When the Vicarage was reached, a group of children rushed to the hall door to criticise their elder sister in her white gown, and the missing governess.
“Hasn’t Miss Lane come back yet?” asked Mrs. Mainwaring, rather anxiously. “Their carriage passed us a long time ago,” she added, when the children had shaken their heads in surprise.
“She will stay at the Grange to tea, of course, mamma,” said Joan, acidly.
And again Mrs. Mainwaring, with a glance at her husband, dropped the subject.
The Grange was a sort of an ogre’s castle to the simple lady, and not quite without reason. There is in most quiet country neighborhoods a house with this sort of reputation, where there lives a wicked man who does not come regularly to church, and who goes to bed and gets up again at unorthodox hours, and whose guests do the same and worse things besides; where there is a tribe of servants who find it difficult to obtain places in the neighborhood on leaving; and where, above all, there is a family of healthy, high-spirited, ill-disciplined children, rough girls and rougher boys, who grow up with a bad name, which becomes steadily worse as the wild lads grow into manhood, and the girls, without any one’s saying that there is any “harm in them,” acquire the stigma of being “fast.” The Grange was more worthy of its bad reputation than most homes of the same type. Sir George Braithwaite, the present owner, had in his youth on several occasions narrowly escaped appearing in the London police courts; he had sobered down somewhat on coming into the baronetcy; but in four wild sons, whose doings were the scandal of the neighborhood, he saw the follies of his own youth repeated and developed.
When, two years before, the Reverend John Mainwaring became Vicar of Garstone, the inmates of the Grange had made advances to the new-comers, had petted the pretty Betty and invited the elder boys to fish and shoot during the holidays. But the vicar and his wife soon took alarm, and, while striving to maintain an appearance of perfect good-will, discouraged the intimacy between the younger members of the families, until the proud Braithwaites, seeing at last through the civil excuses and regrets, drew back suddenly and held themselves as far aloof as Mrs. Mainwaring could wish. The intimacy thus abruptly checked had never been renewed, and, although the members of the two families greeted each other without apparent ill-will when by chance they met, there was no cordiality on either side—the Grange laughed at the Vicarage as “slow,” the Vicarage shuddered at the Grange as “fast.”