“Dear me, that is singular indeed,” said Mr. Williams.
“A very high-spirited family yours, vicar,” said Ned, who had not moved a muscle during this recital, “and the spirit is sure to peep out sooner or later. You, I think, though you’ll excuse my saying so, are about the only one of the bunch that hasn’t let it peep out rather discreditably.”
“Perhaps my sins are all to come,” said the vicar with a jolly laugh.
And, catching sight of the two young people who were waiting for a hearing, Mr. Brander himself introduced Olivia Denison to old Mr. Williams, and left the group to join his other guests.
CHAPTER XXII.
The haymaking in the glebe field of Rishton Vicarage was an annual affair, an institution of Meredith Brander’s own, dating from the young days of his reign. It had been at its origin a thoroughly Radical institution, a freak of the then very youthful vicar, who had not yet quite dropped all the wild ideas for the reconstruction of society of his university days. Rich and poor, gentle and simple, an invitation had been extended to all; the glebe field was to be the scene of such an harmonious commingling of class and class as had not been dreamed of since the dim days of Feudalism. For a year or two both the villagers and the richer class were represented; the former sparsely, it is true. But there was no commingling. Then the villagers, not quite understanding the vicar’s idea, began to have a suspicion that, besides being somewhat bored and bewildered by the entertainment and the necessity for putting on “company manners,” they were being laughed at; and thenceforth they stayed away altogether. So that the annual haymaking had now become what Mr. Brander called “a mere commonplace omnium gatherum,” where the lowest class represented was that of well-to-do farmers, whose wives and daughters having replaced the straightforward rusticity of half a century ago for a veneer of fashion and refinement, were tiresome guests, captious, self-assertive, and intolerable.
Among the most prominent members of this last class were the two daughters of John Oldshaw. Despising their shy, good-hearted brother Mat as much as they did their coarse-mannered father, they prattled of Gilbert and Sullivan’s last opera, of the newest shape of sunshade, of the most recently published novel, uneasily anxious to show that they were abreast of the times. They hated Olivia Denison for her easy superiority; and while indignant with their brother for admiring her, they were still more indignant at the knowledge that he was too much her inferior for her to treat him with anything but kindness.
Olivia, who was always scrupulously courteous to these young ladies, shook hands with them as she left the tent with her persistent admirer, Fred Williams, who, with little attempt at concealment, tried to draw her away from the farmer’s daughters.
“How charming Mrs. Brander is looking to-day!” said the elder, in the loud, unpleasant voice which shivered in a moment all her pretensions to refinement. “She reminds me more of Lady Grisdale every time I see her.”
Lady Grisdale was a fashionable beauty, whose photograph, together with those of the Guernsey Rose and Mrs. Carnaby East, adorned Miss Oldshaw’s drawing-room mantelpiece in a plush frame.