For Mrs. Waldron and the two young misses, her daughters, were quite as much in love with the pleasures of the town as the husband and father was with those of the country. And in dress, manner, conversation, and tone they marked the difference between themselves and him as ostentatiously as possible.
Thus, while the squire wore the old-fashioned Ramillies wig, with its bush of powdered hair at the sides, and long pigtail tied at the top and bottom with black ribbon, and the loosely-fitting scarlet coat which he had worn for any number of years, his good wife and two round-faced, simpering daughters were all attired in the latest modes of the town.
They all three wore the loose sacque or negligee, which was then the height of fashion; they tottered about in slim-heeled shoes, under huge hoops which swayed as they walked; while their hair was all dressed in the same way—knotted up tightly under the smallest and closest of caps, making their heads look singularly small and mean, when compared with the enormous width of their distended skirts.
They all seemed the most amiable of living creatures; and Lieutenant Tregenna found at last the sympathy he wanted when he expressed that horror and hatred of smugglers which was at present the ruling passion of his mind. The squire had left him with the ladies, and he had been entertaining them with an account of the adventure of the preceding night.
“And I can assure you, madam,” he said to his hostess, when they had hung attentively on his words, and cried, “Wretch!” “Villains!” “How monstrous shocking!” at appropriate intervals, “that so deep-rooted has this evil become, that even the parson and his young daughter appeared to grieve more for the smuggler whom I wounded than they did for the poor fellow whom the ruffians shot!”
“His daughter! Oh, do you mean Mistress Joan?” said Mrs. Waldron, pursing her mouth a little. “Sure, sir, what would you expect from a country-bred wench like that, who tramps the villages and moors with her father like a man, and is almost as much among these fearsome wretches, the smugglers, as if she were their own kin?”
“Oh, la, sir; you must know they call her ‘the curate,’” cried one of the young ladies, tittering, and looking languishingly at the visitor out of her little pink-rimmed eyes with the whitish eyelashes; “for she’s quite as useful in his parish as he is.”
“And I’m sure ’tis a very rational diversion for a girl of her tastes,” said her sister. “You must know, sir, that she has never seen a play, nor any of the diversions of the town, and that she fills up her time twittering on a dulcimer to her father, and has barely so much as heard of the harpsichord.”
“I don’t wonder you was affronted by her Gothic behavior,” went on Mrs. Waldron; “but sure ’tis very excusable in a girl who has no polish, no refinement, and who takes no more care of her complexion than if she was a dairymaid.”
Tregenna felt considerable surprise at the storm of reprobation which he had brought down on the head of poor Joan. For he could not know that the young men of the neighborhood, and even Bertram, the squire’s son, all showed a most boorish preference for handsome, straight-limbed Joan, with her free bearing and her ready tongue, over the fine ladies of Hurst Court; and that, at the Hastings assemblies, and at such routs as were given in the neighborhood, Joan had more partners than any one else, though her gown was seldom of the latest mode, and her only fan was one which had belonged to her grandmother.